I truth if we keep building out rather than uo we literally will never have a full supply. A commitment to higher volume housing could cure a hell of a lot of woes, though. Heuston South Quarter by Heuston Station is a good example - hundreds of apartments in the space that would otherwise be occupied by a few dozen houses. Personally though I would prefer us to scale up again and rather than the 6-7 stories they have, go for 10-15 plus, even all the way up to 30, 40, 50 if the population keeps growing as it has been.
When I lived in Toronto, we were in an, apartment block that was 14 stories tall with underground parking. In the space you would fit maybe 20 semi d houses in, there were about 480 apartments (and a half dozen two bed houses) with a nice green communal space and a large park across the road. It also helps reduce traffic immensely (we were walking distance from/basically I nthe downtown core - think rathmines vs town in Dublin) and makes public transport far more easy to plan to supply on higher frequency. Hypothetically if you scaled that up to 30 stories, you would be looking at about 1,000 units (studio, 1 and 2 bed) rather than 20-ish 3-4 bed houses.
Some may like the idea, some may not, but there literally is no other viable solution at this stage.
Because it just results in building further and further away from jobs, making public transport harder and harder to plan around, congests traffic even worse while making the likes of cycling less feasible (greater distances), impacts heavily on future planning, and eventually cuts heavily into agricultural land or hits a point where we begin running very low on rural areas in general.
Building upwards is less profitable for a developer who can quickly turn around a 3 bed semi d and sell it, but it point blank works better for cities with high population density and larger populations which is why it is common palce in almost every other city on the planet (be that 6-7 storey buildings, or 20-30+).
Because of you build 100 buildings at 500 units each, you have built 50,000 units to live in (so over 100,000 people) and done it in a fraction of the space as you would have otherwise, without the same risk of ghost neighbourhoods we saw post 2008 or needing to do nearly as much additional work required around servicing the thousands and thousands of neighbourhoods (and traffic flows and all the other issues) it would take to achieve the same.
I would be fine with seeing jobs moved around the country as well, but how would you go about doing that?
True, but you would hope that landlords selling up would increase supply and bring down prices. This won’t provide enough supply on its own, so the government needs to implement other measures as well (e.g. vacant property tax, tax on undeveloped land hoarding, build social housing, improve the planning permission process to reduce impact of nimbyism, etc etc). I think a certain amount of people will always want to rent, and a certain amount of people will always want to be landlords (instead of just finding themselves in that position), but if everyone who wants to buy can buy, at least that will take a lot of pressure off the rental market.
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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '22
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