Sir, – Some say the solution to Dublin’s housing problem is to zone more land outside the surrounding counties and build thousands of semi-detached houses.
Yet Dublin has a very low housing density and it is expanding fast. The lower end of projections are that we will need another 900,000 dwellings in the next 50 years.
This population growth should and could be contained within the existing configuration, which would still result in its population being considerably less than Berlin, which has a slightly smaller area, and is not considered a high-density city by European standards.
The other issue is the call for more suburban houses.
Families with children account for only a third of households yet over two-thirds of our dwellings are family houses.
Recent projections by the Housing Agency are that 75 per cent of demand is for households of one to three people. Most of our building programme into the future needs to be small dwellings, mostly apartments.
We need to build good accommodation for empty-nesters to free up family houses and to provide a wide range of different apartment types to house small households and to adopt many of the houses already split into rooms or small flats, to provide a much better level of accommodation.
One model is the more upmarket version of student housing, where there are, say, four studios for one or two people who then share a generous living, dining and kitchen area.
There are already many suburban infill schemes, with a mix of apartments and terrace houses at densities from 30 to 50 dwellings per acre.
There is a huge stock of vacant or underused land in Dublin. The local authorities own at least 520 acres, and there is much more in private ownership.
The vacant sites levy may go some way to release this land, but a site value tax would have much more positive results. Such a tax has been strongly supported by the chambers of commerce and Ibec at recent public meetings. It was part of the last programme for government. – Yours, etc,
JAMES PIKE,
O’Mahony Pike Architects,
Milltown,
Dublin 6.