‘Street plans’ could deliver 14,000 new homes a year and help solve the housing crisis

The Irish housing crisis is devastating. In February 2023, fewer than 1,100 properties were available to rent across the entire country. Many young people have largely given up on any hope of home ownership; many more still have lost even the hope of renting in places like Dublin or Cork. According to a recent poll by the National Youth Council, 70 per cent of young people are considering packing up and moving abroad.

One major reason for ongoing failures is that new housing proposals have failed to win over local communities. By building a broad coalition of support, our new report – entitled Street Plans and authored by the co-founder of the Better Planning Alliance, Robert Tolan – offers a way to address this.

Our idea is to give individual streets the right to opt in to more “gentle density” development.

Gentle density refers to slightly denser urban forms than detached housing. International examples include Fitzroofs in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, London, where residents applied, as a group, to the local council to each add an additional floor to their homes. Germany and California allow residents to build an additional unit in their back garden. In an Irish context, gentle density might involve expanding small terraced homes by adding another floor, creating an apartment to be rented out.

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By winning the support of local communities, we hope to be able to expedite development – and reduce the scale of the crisis.

The idea is simple. We propose letting each community draw up a street plan to allow further development on their own street, as an additional community-led way to build homes.

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Once the plan is formed, residents and homeowners can register their support through a local petition. If enough residents agree – we suggest it needs the agreement of an overwhelming majority – each plot on the street is granted planning permission in line with the street plan.

Crucially, the lion’s share of the benefits of that development would be distributed among the communities most affected and invested in the priorities most important to them – such as schools, public transport infrastructure and GP surgeries. Not only would this proposal provide desperately needed homes but, by encouraging more of the gentle density that people already know in Ireland’s historic towns and cities, it could revitalise our town centres by increasing foot traffic. Implementing street plans in Ireland could generate 14,000 additional homes per year, according to our estimates.

Current policy was created with the hope residents and homeowners would absorb the negative effects of development through sheer goodwill. This hope is manifestly not working

Street plans aren’t a new idea. While our report is based on ideas successfully introduced elsewhere – for example in Israel, South Korea and the US – it sets out a uniquely Irish approach to empowering communities to build more homes and capture the benefits.

Ireland’s historic housing crisis co-exists uneasily with widespread local opposition to building more homes. How we think about local opposition falls at one of two extremes. On the one hand, local opposition is thought of as something to circumnavigate, crush or ignore as developments are forced through despite local petitions. On the other, local opposition is believed to be an unmovable barrier to development, one that must be accepted as a law of nature. Yet this opposition should not be ignored nor is it inevitable. In fact, communities can be empowered to champion development, revitalising stagnant city and town centres.

A figure of 14,000 new homes sounds like a big number, but some similar ideas abroad have had a big impact. To shore up their housing stock against earthquakes, Israel adopted a related proposal, known as Tama 38. On this rule, if 80 per cent of residents in a block agree, the entire building can be demolished and replaced with a larger one. If a 66 per cent threshold is met, residents are enabled to build extensions to their property. Between 2018 and 2020, Tama 38 accounted for approximately 31 per cent of all new homes built in Tel Aviv. In the 1990s, Seoul faced a housing shortage. It chose to boost housing supply through Joint Redevelopment Projects or JRPs which permitted development in an area if 75 per cent of homeowners agreed to it. In 1992, the JRPs accounted for 52 per cent of all new apartments, despite being only available in a tiny fraction of the city. More recently, a similar plan has passed through the House of Commons in the UK and looks set to become law.

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Street plans could provide a community-led means to achieve similar results in Ireland, making both affordable rental and homeownership possible for a generation for whom that is now near-impossible.

In theory, we all want to see more homes built. . But politics has been a major obstacle. Obtaining planning permission is onerous. Local developments are not only slowed down by local objections but those originating from anywhere in the country. For this reason, any homeowners seeking to develop their property do not even step onto the first ladder of this process. We urgently need a better planning system that is more fit for purpose.

Current policy was created with the hope that residents and homeowners would choose to absorb the negative effects of development through sheer goodwill. This hope is not only naive: it manifestly is not working.

The status quo has made finding our way out of the housing crisis into a zero-sum game. A younger generation is cast as a victim with everything to gain and older homeowners are cast as miserly incumbents with everything to lose. But it does not need to be this way. International experience shows that many local communities will support additional development if they share its benefits.

With homelessness at an all-time high and young people packing their bags, we have everything to gain and little to lose by trying street plans.

Seán O’Neill McPartlin is the co-founder of the Better Planning Alliance, an organisation which researches innovative policy solutions in the housing sector