Forget the 15-minute city. Irish housing policy is creating dystopian one-hour cities

Since May this year, many senior politicians, including the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, have been making hay from two housing statistics. The first is that over 400 people are buying their first home every week, and the second is that, by the end of this year, over 100,000 new homes will have been built by this government since 2020.

These claims are inter-related and worth unpicking. The Taoiseach’s “more than 400 a week” figure comes from mortgage drawdown statistics from the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland (BPFI), banking sector lobbyists.

This is ostensibly good news, but mortgage drawdown isn’t the same as people buying their own home, as this figure includes drawdowns for people building their own homes, not buying them on the market. This is not nit-picking. Analysis of housing completion and stamp duty figures shows that almost 40 per cent of those drawing down a mortgage for their first home in 2022 were self-builders, mostly rural, often building on their own land.

The actual number of first-time buyers of new and second-hand houses in the market recorded by stamp duty executions averaged 331 per week in the year from August 2022 to July 2023. Not quite over 400 then.

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Almost 40 per cent of those drawing down a mortgage for their first home in 2022 were self-builders, mostly rural, often building on their own land

Of the 331 weekly first-time buyers nationally – average age 35, up from 25 in the 1990s – 101 of these bought new homes and the remainder purchased a second-hand home. It is revealing to look at where they bought.

Looking at Co Dublin (population 1.27 million), there was an average of 23 first-time buyers of new homes a week, with another 82 buying second-hand homes. In Dublin city, there was an average of just two first-time buyers a week buying a new home, and 35 buying a second-hand home. The numbers for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, the wealthiest borough in the country, are three and 12 respectively. Figures for the Fingal and South Dublin County Council areas are similarly low.

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First-time buyers are instead buying their homes in the commuter belt of the mid-east region including Louth, where sales of new homes to first-time buyers are up over 200 per cent between 2017 – the year Simon Coveney started turbo-charging urban apartment development – and 2022. This buying pattern has now extended into the midlands of Longford and Westmeath. Over the same period, sales of new homes to first-time buyers in Dublin City are down over 70 per cent.

Former owner-occupiers is what the Central Statistics Office calls “movers”. At an average age of 43, former owner-occupiers are the ideal purchaser as they often have equity built up in their existing property, usually earn more than first-time buyers and, being less financially constrained, have more money to spend. These are the buyers who keep the wheels of the housing market turning.

In the 12 months to July this year, nationwide there was an average of 70 sales of new homes to former owner-occupiers per week, and some 446 second-hand homes. In Dublin city over the same period, just two new homes per week were sold to former owner-occupiers and 51 second-hand homes. From 2017 to July 2023, despite sustained housing output, sales of new homes to former owner-occupiers in Co Dublin have decreased by over one-third.

These movers are also moving, mostly to the mid-east and Louth, many following their grown-up children.

It is not just in Dublin that sales of new homes have evaporated. In Cork city (population 222,500) from August 2022 to the end of July this year, first-time buyers bought 10 new houses, less than one per week. Purchases of second-hand homes were not much better at six and nine per week for first-time buyers and former owner-occupiers respectively. At the same time, apartment development there has gone from less than 3 per cent of all housing output in 2017 to almost 25 per cent last year.

It mostly goes unnoticed that just over half of all new housing completions – and thousands of second-hand houses – are bought by an arm of the State or investment fund so they never become new homes for sale. Add to this the thousands of new self-build houses annually that never reach the market. The result is that, each year, despite overall housing output rising, there is an ever-decreasing proportion of new homes coming to the market available for the ever-increasing cohort of first-time buyers and others to purchase.

Political boasts of everything going gangbusters in housing are more style than substance

The Tánaiste’s 100,000 new homes claim may be technically accurate, but it most certainly does not pass the smell test, given most will never have been offered for sale to potential homeowners.

Should current trends continue, our 66 per cent home ownership rate – well below the EU average – will not recover any time soon. This is critical in a country whose welfare system is based on home ownership. In 2020, the median wealth of an Irish homeowner was €303,900 compared to €5,300 for a renter.

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Incentives such as Help to Buy and the First Home shared equity scheme are being offered for products that do not exist where demand is greatest.

The absence of new housing for sale is mostly a consequence of policymakers’ fixation on uber-high levels of density in urban housing development. This has resulted in tens of thousands of allegedly sustainable apartments built for rent, but at the unsustainable price of the social and economic bedrock of homeownership.

Any benefits of increased housing density are also wiped out as aspiring homeowners regress to two-car, 1960s American-style commuter living. Unsurprisingly then, since 2016 the number of people leaving for work before 6.30am has increased 23 per cent, and the number leaving between 6.30am and 7am has increased by 47 per cent.

All policy levers have been pulled to facilitate apartment development for rent, a model whose tenure and typology conflicts with the systemic welfare necessity of homeownership. In so doing, rainmaker ministers and industry-led policymakers have created uncontrollable urban sprawl, a dearth of housing for sale where needed, and the uniquely Irish “one-hour city” model. This is a particularly bizarre outcome with a Green party in government.

Political boasts of everything going gangbusters are more style than substance. Serious questions need to be asked about why planning policy is working against the sustainable development of housing for sale, and what the national and personal implications of this will be.

Mel Reynolds is an architect and housing policy analyst. Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin