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Seamus as you well know; this is about squandering resources on a project that there is no money to fund; take 3 PPPs St Michaels which I have not previously raised but for which the funding position of DCC has deteriorated; the Tuam Motorway which has been green lighted by planners, government (previous humiliated one) but not capital markets i.e. they can’t raise a washer. Take MN it gets green lit by government and the country goes bust, PPP can’t raise funds to finish it; who is going to clear up the mess?

Dead and buried; now if they could just stop wasting money on something that may be shelved for the next 40 years or so then they could fix the roof in Hume Street and flat complexes such as St Michaels in Inchicore where the PPP process fell apart….

The park and ride will be moved to somewhere around the Malahide estuary, as recommended by APB.

An Bord simply removed the park and ride they did not suggest where it should go; as anyone who remembers soundbites will head in cupboard’s one of “The Swans and the Snails” which referred to a rare snail that cost a lot of money and time on the Kildare Bypass and the Swans were those that call the Broadmeadow Estury protected habitat. The park and ride can go to Donabate and use the Northern line; end of inflating the figures, the figures need to relate to unique user trips that specific catchments generate; the further up the northern line park and ride goes the less strain is put on the M1.

The depot will be located in Dardistown, along with another P&R for the M50.

Why in gods name would you put a park n ride on the M50? N3 has rail at Blanch, M1 has a choice of other locations to build one including Gormanstown, Balibriggan and Donabate. I am in no doubt that An Bord identified the lack of ridership on the catchment and chose to expose it by eliminating the park and ride passenger demand to undermine the project fatally in a manner that saw them retain their track record of not refusing one large scale infrastrucuture project but making it so unviable that the bean counters would veto it; they chose to do so in a way that clearly exposed the emperor’s clear nudity but kept them off a collision course with the autocratic Lenihan Bros government.

Show me where you could route a Luas Line from the City Centre to Ballymun and Swords.

Luas BX to Constitution Hill near Broadstone, disused canal, tunnel from Royal Canal to football pitch at Tolka river, St Mobhi Road surface to north of Ballymun before taking the proposed RPA alignment to Swords.

Luas would not have the capacity nor frequency for such a route.

43m Luas carries 430 people, demand for this line is less than 3,000; Luas at intervals of 9 minutes has spare capacity even to handle peak demand which allows for 5 years of moderate growth. 4 minute intervals delivers 6,450 passengers per hour peak. Metro North with a design spec of 20,000 would not hit capacity off a sub 3,000 base for hundred plus years.

The issue is not both Dublin Underground and Metro north and which comes first; it is a question of which gets built; spreading densification and development potential across 4 development corridors through Dublin Underground makes a lot more sense than building a project at half the demand levels to justify Luas capacity.

Why does a ranking exercise scare the proponents of Metro North so much?

@Morlan wrote:

APB eliminated three stops at Belinstown, Lissenhall and Seatown, and ordered the relocation of a depot and park and ride facility.
Great decision by the APB,

You do realise that in so doing they removed over 20% of peak ridership; given that park and ride could have been provided anywhere between Dunleer and Donabate on the Northern line it was absolutely the correct decision to remove these stations.

It did however fatally damage the project, what the public are being asked to buy into is spending €3bn on a system with a capacity for 20,000 hourly peak when demand is less than 3,000 per hour or half what a Luas line can deliver. And yes Dart Underground is the cost of building it, despite all the assurances it wouldn’t be, still no connection between Dublin’s four existing rail lines, 3 of which excceded capacity 10 years ago.

@Morlan wrote:

There is a bug in the forum software. I kept getting this error:

Your images may only be up to 800 pixels wide.

But they are 800px wide. I had to click ‘submit’ about 10 times and eventually they went through. Annoying.

It consulted experian, who said no

Without a shadow of a doubt one of the best buildings done in Irish Commercial architecture and will like Carrolls be lauded for decades to come; sadly like Carrolls the occupants of the building really did not understand the bigger picture of the job they were engaged in or maybe they did but were unwilling to stick their heads above the parapet to call stop; if more attention were paid to the health and safety of the system versus errecting what are quite attractive railings……

One hopes that when the pick up happens that less speculative ‘back office spec’ development occurs at edge city and that high profile sites such as 65/71 Stephens Green, VHI on Abbey Street and Findlater House on OCS can receive a similar treatment to this plot; there are a lot of the mistakes of the 1980’s still to be unwound on Dublin’s Streets.

There are some great architectural practices in Dublin capable of very good work lets hope that the next round of FDI has an appetite for their work and are not funnelled into decentralisation mecca’s such as Cahersiveen and Trim.

New Paulson fund seeks dollars in the desert
Firm raised about $315 million in late 2010 for real-estate bets

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — John Paulson, head of hedge-fund giant Paulson & Co., turned bullish on the U.S. housing market in early 2010. Now he’s got a fund that’s betting on a rebound.

One of the firm’s latest projects has taken it into the Sonoran Desert in the American Southwest, in search of empty residential-development lots.

In November, the firm finished raising capital for the Paulson Real Estate Recovery Fund, gathering roughly $315 million in commitments from investors, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Bay Area luxury homes are hot sellersHouses selling for more than $2 million spiked in 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the most pricey home sold in San Francisco for $15.5 million. Pui-Wing Tam talks with Stacey Delo.
The vehicle is a private-equity fund, rather than a hedge fund. This means Paulson makes capital calls to investors when opportunities arise. It also means investors are locked in for many years.

Paulson seeded the fund with some of his own money and brought in Michael Barr, a former real-estate, private-equity specialist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. /quotes/comstock/11i!lehmq (LEHMQ 0.04, 0.00, -0.94%) , to run it.

One of the fund’s main strategies is to buy undeveloped tracts of land that already have environmental and building permits. Roads, sewers and electricity may also be in place, but not homes, according to one of the people familiar with the fund.

If the real-estate market recovers enough for developers to start building more new houses, this may be the type of land they buy first. That’s because a lot of the costly, time-consuming preparation work already has been done, the person explained.

Such a recovery may take years to materialize, if at all. TrimTabs Investment Research warned Thursday that the housing market is unlikely to recover for five or six more years.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-paulson-fund-seeks-dollars-in-the-desert-2011-01-27

A paved road is surrounded by weeds in an unfinished subdivision in Coolidge, Ariz.
In the meantime, the Paulson fund has the flexibility to hold onto land. That’s because investors in the fund are committed for multiple years and the land is purchased with no leverage, the person added.

It is pretty logical that they are buying land that is already zoned and serviced versus the faith, hope and charity nonsense that has destroyed the irish land market.

RTÉ challenges changes to zoning conditions
Updated: 18:14, Monday, 24 January 2011

RTÉ and the Sisters of Charity religious order have brought separate High Court challenges to Dublin City Council’s decision to impose what they say are restrictive conditions on the potential development of their lands.

RTÉ and the Sisters of Charity religious order have brought separate High Court challenges to decisions by Dublin City Council to impose what they say are restrictive conditions on the potential development of their lands.

Mr Justice Michael Peart gave leave to the two bodies to bring judicial review proceedings against the council over its new City Development Plan 2011-17, which brought in zoning changes on the lands last November.

RTÉ says the decisions will have a serious impact on redevelopment plans for their Montrose complex at Donnybrook, Dublin, while the Sisters of Charity say 18 parcels of land around Dublin, totalling 108 acres, will be affected.

The court heard all the land has been zoned ‘Z15’ in the new plan, which effectively implements a tougher designation than had been applied in the previous plan.

It means future uses such as housing development are not open for planning consideration, impacting on the ability of bodies like the Sisters and RTÉ to sell off land to fund their activities.

In RTÉ’s case, the new zoning does not even allow for media-associated uses to be considered, Nuala Butler SC, for RTÉ, told the court.

Ms Butler said the station had engaged fully in the development plan process and had in fact got a less restrictive ‘Z12’ zoning in the amended draft plan, which was put on public display between 18 August and 15 November 2010.

But when it came back before the council on 23 November, councillors passed two resolutions reverting the zoning to ‘Z15’.

Ms Butler said RTÉ had already got approval for ‘Project 2025’, a major redevelopment of Montrose as a purpose-built complex for the digital age.

This would involve the rationalisation of the existing campus, making Project 2025 viable, counsel said.

In the Sisters of Charity proceedings, it is claimed the development plan is substantively illegal because it applies a restrictive zoning to an arbitrary selection of lands which include St Vincent’s Private Hospital, St Mary’s, Donnybrook, the Hospice, Harold’s Cross, and a number of school sites in the north and south city.

There was no evidence before the council establishing any particular need for the ‘Z15’ zoning, which has been applied in a manner that flies in the face of fundamental reason and common sense, they claim.

They are seeking orders quashing the adoption of the zoning on their lands, and a stay on the operation of the section of the plan affecting their property.

They are also seeking damages for breaches of their private property and religious freedom rights under the Constitution and similar rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Brian Murray SC, for the Sisters, said extensive legal submissions were put to the council during the development plan process, making the same complaints as were being made in the High Court proceedings.

However, ‘no reason was given as to why they were rejected,’ counsel said.

This action was terribly important from his clients’ point of view because in order to maintain its charitable work, it is necessary to sell lands from time to time to generate income, counsel said.

I do have a certain amount of sympathy with both RTE who appear precluded from developing even institutional type accomodation on their holding and the Sisters of Charity who have for many decades drip fed small parcels of land to the market to meet the costs of their retired congregation members.

All too often councillors make development plans with a view to appeasing NIMBYs; I don’t know the Sisters of Charity holdings but in the case of RTE it seems ludicrous given its proximity to a QBC and the fact it is at least for now an owner occupied national institution, all the same NIMBY arguments were raised on the Elm Park site that McNamara developed and as a scheme it works really well in every sense if valuations were frozen at 2003 levels.

I wish both groups well; no single landowners should be singled out to act as local amenity lands or under-developed holdings all this serves to do is allow poor public open space provision in neighbouring future developments be excused by those applicants referencing these applicants amenity lands as giving a higher quality provision.

@pico wrote:

and it’s only benefit to be a financial gain for the lessor.

Spot on; there is no way that the display in any way contributes to the design of the building; if the building were a cliff of glass then fair enough; but it is a mock heritage facade which was not designed to incorporate a large format digital display. That the centre greedily packs in an arrangement of kiosks that destroy circulation quality and render the opportunities to install such a display effective internally was the designers choice back in the late 1980’s. To see where this media is done well look at the use of this media in the Trafford Centre foodcourt as featured in the Apprentice late last year; effective, communicates a message and bombards people with a series of messages whilst they eat; a captive audience in a privately owned internal space.

wondered why something like this wasn’t being used to post useful info lots of people needed at that time.

Because public information doesn’t contribute income. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy git; but the track record of Dublin City Council’s enforcement of signage from billboards to politically motivated cranks such as Korkey’s with an almost full building advertising shroud and now digital displays is not fit for purpose. I would ask DCC enforcement to view google street view of Oxford Circus in London; how much illegal signage and how many digital displays do you see?

Now if legislation were passed that all income from illegal signage, displays etc were forfeited upon prosecution and fines levied can you really see any landowners engaging in this type of behaviour if they lost the income and had to pay fines and legal costs?

You can do development plans, talk about about strategy, cut airport duty but if a city feels tacky then tourists won’t return, retailers won’t renew leases and you end up with secondary pitches of vacant and shuttered shops. Time to see some civic pride at council level………

It pays to take the chance…….