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1. If your proposal goes ahead, then some people associated with the
builders of the vacant new houses will seek to get disposal of these
added to your proposal — and you know what’s wrong with that.
It will take a lot more than simply changing the look of these houses
by means of more glazing or adding sun-lounges to make them viable.
A lot of them are slap-up jobs, awkwardly designed and painfully
identical to look at.Exactly why you would sell them with OPP only with the local planners to enforce design standards at local level; I do believe that the fall in overall construction costs and site acquisition costs will lead to better design standards as at these levels people are paying a lot less for both the initial site purchase and rate per sq m for base build; earnings and earnings multiples on mortages whilst down still make housing more affordable; this should make it easier for planners to coax people into better designs. When you look at a lot of the houses built in places like Rockbrook in the 1970s and 1980s they were much better designed than most of the muck thrown up in the last decade. Bad design remains a threat but a little help from the property supplements on good design would help greatly.
2. Surely just sub-dividing into 1/8 acre lots and holding an auction is not good urban planning.
For one thing, a lot of villagers are now looking around for allotments.I think that some of the land should go into that.
(BTW, I mean properly lain-out allotments with water tap points every 4 plots, a horshoe driveway around, a shed for the allotment holders association and some parking for casual veg buyers.) Secondly, some land must be consigned for common areas, landscaping and amenity areas, e.g. sports areas & pramming paths.
Thirdly, is 1/8 acre (which is 25 yds x 24.2 yds) enough of private land to induce people to move away from a one-off site and into a village setting ?
I think not. Have a row with the Mrs in the 1/8 acre lot and the whole damn village will know about it.Thirdly I would roughly calclulate an acre as 4,166 sq m and allow 516 sq m for roadway/ paths, planting etc; each plot would therefore be 450 sq m; which I would configure in plots of 15m frontage and 30m depth; this would allow 8m for a front garden / driveway; 12m depth assumed build area of 180sq m or say 165 sq m when circulation is allowed for at ground with a smaller first floor of 135 sq m. Then the rear garden would be 10m deep and 15 m wide. These would give the ability to create very attractive double front houses. All development on unzoned land would be banned except where people could prove they are farmers or where a son/daughter could prove they are a full time carer to a farmer. The self build option would be there but not in a manner that undermines the existing overscaled land bank.
3. What about the growing self-generation energy needs of these new inhabitants ?
A one-off has both more space and more potential co-operators likelocal farmers for building a wind generator.
The energy generation situation needs consideration at the planning stage.On a recent visit to a village just outside Nice a family friend outlined the deal they had just secured from EDF where they got a government guaranteed bank loan to install solar panels; they could buy units of electricity from the grid at 12c and sell solar electricity back to EDF at 20c per unit. Two reasons why this wouldn’t work in Ireland; one there is no sun and secondly the ESB doesn’t behave like a charity. I am a great fan of wind energy but in two circumstances; one where it is either off shore or somewhere like a disused bog and secondly where the government creates a false market; the government can’t afford a false market and the costs of connecting small numbers of turbines exceed the payback; if oil gets over $200 then you may be right but we are a long way from that point.
Not trying to be argumentative Teak; you clearly know this area well and make some very good points; but I have a very strong conviction that as a society we can’t afford one off housing any more; we need to shift the landbank that has €50bn of govt cash tied up in it and get that cash back tomuch more productive uses.
You are right; and by holding tens of billions in a non-performing asset class we will fall further behind; if residential development could within a couple of years hit 20,000 units a year or half the long run average then NAMA could unlock a billion a year and you would probably see employment rise by 50,000 taking a further €500m – €800m off the deficit in reduced welfare costs; add in stamp duty, vat etc and things do look better.
The question is are NAMA willing to take a first step and try something new and not very expensive in carving up some of their less prime development land?
You can push NAMA all you want but their mandate is basically to manage loans; how you instruct them to dispose of a certain class of land is about the best chance to spur development. How many people do you know would have selected the self build option if it were open to them at a reasonable price?
Mews sites capable of delivering 200 sq m were changing hands for €500k in the better parts of Dublin 5 years ago; giving people the opportunity to self build for a modest land price at the very edge of an urban area would to my mind be real progress; as it would allow for the first time in the Irish property market to buy a plot and have an architect build a home in phases; i.e. phase 1 a conventional home of say 3 beds which was capable of extension as the needs of their family grew over time.
From a Macro viewpoint; If the average land price paid by speculators during the boom was €1m per acre this would see the exchequer recover €400k – €600k which given most of these loans were bought at a 70% – 80% discount would be cash generative and significantly balance sheet positive even after the costs of roads and site preparation were deducted.
In addition it would have the capacity to get architects and small building contractors working again. The recovery will be slow but ensuring that the government starts to derisk NAMA from the earliest possible stage is vital.
I think you need to layer residential development land into a minimum of 4 levels
1. Urban regeneration
2. New towns/ large suburban extensions
3. Small scale urban infill & Edge town up to 200 units intended at 16 – 25 units per acre
4. Failed commuter town large holdingsWith classes 1 & 2 you need to leave to the professionals that have demonstrated an ability to have their business plans accepted by NAMA; on large scale developments the state has no business doing anything other than assessing the loan positions and if necessary bringing in other professional development outfits to take these over either completely or as lead developer with NAMA retaining some equity but the development finance coming exclusively from the private sector.
Class 4 is worthless; it should be rented as agricultural land or to sporting organisations into the long term.
Class 3 is to my mind the one area where a complete rethink on strategy is required; during the bubble there was complete tunnel vision with this land class, none of the vision of Adamstown largely because the holdings were both too small and too close to existing retail and social infrastructure to merit the usual parade of convenience store, dry cleaners, cafe, pharmacy etc.
Property markets are all about the creation of confidence and the ability of financial institutions to lend money to purchasers based on comparable evidence and an added margin of safety put down by the purchaser in the form of a deposit to insulate the bank from short term volatility.
I don’t disagree that FPP is the only way to deliver the final product and that in larger schemes that are so large as to be more than 10 mins walk from an existing town centre that you need to look at more comprehensive planning even if that involves more than one ownership.
The reason I selected a 10 acre site is that there are probably hundreds of 10 acre sites that have FPP for schemes that people simply will not buy into at present because the individual existing homes are poorly proportioned and largely unattractive homes that were bought previously out of a fear of not getting onto the property ladder before it got beyond you. The climate has changed the onus is now on the industry to give people a better product.
The simple change I am advocating is that small sites in the right locations should move away from the developer led approach and should be carved up piecemeal into plots for people to self build; as opposed to one design house designing 200 houses in a maximum of 4 – 5 design styles.
What I propose would involve one design team designing road layouts and local agents marketing individual plots sold with the the right to build on any one of the the 80 plots of say 480 sq m with c40 sq m being reserved for the road and paths; people would have an OPP to build up to 350 sq m at a maximum height of say three storeys. This would allow individuals the same package as doing a one off house; but the house would form part of a town and would also be open to small scale builders to build one or more plots speculatively for resale or as buy to let investments.
If 3,500 units were sold off at €50k each this could unlock €175m a year from holdings which are currently valued at nil in most analysts opinion. The construction budget would be another €1bn plus; p.a.
@Cathal Dunne wrote:
The RPA consistently under-estimates the true passenger numbers of the projects they develop, Metro is basically a Luas north of Northwood, it doesn’t stop at Northwood and has significant trip generators around each of its stops and the Luas isn’t future-proofed for 15-20 years. It’s at capacity now 6 years after opening and that’s with longer trams than originally anticipated at the launch of service. Building a Luas line like you’re always saying is a total non-solution as it doesn’t have the capacity nor roadspace.
The demand numbers at peak in the 2010 CBA were 3,640 maximum at any time in any direction and this allowed for 2% yoy growth from 2010 to 2015; take out the 666 passengers using Bellinstown and Lissenhall stops which are no longer part of the project and the route has less than 3,000 maximum intra journey deamnd at peak time; remove even 25% of the 700 people at Seatown stop which was deemed unneccessary and you are in the order of 2,800 maximum hourly demand in 5 years time.
Luas has a capacity of 6,000 peak demand; take growth at 2% and it is future proofed for over 38 years; take it at a much more optimistic 5% and it is future proofed for 15 years. If after 10 years the 5% is hit then plans can be made to build an alternative underground route from Northwood into the City Centre plugging in the Eastern Route option that was rejected as the original Luas destination of Ballymun was endorsed.
@Cathal Dunne wrote:
Luas was lines on a map when the FF/PD government came to power in 1997. Metro North is a fully realised project with active bidders, budget for enabling works and a railway order. Luas was nowhere near as shovel-ready as Metro is now in 1997. On top of that, the original idea was for a Luas line to the airport, but that idea was junked by the DTO’s Platform for Change document in 2001 as it was realised it wouldn’t have the capacity, roadspace and speed required. Your fantasy Luas line was therefore abandoned by the experts back in 2001. Moreover, the projections used to justify this stepchange have already been exceeded so there is no doubt that a market exists for the Metro.
I was under the impression both Barclays and HSBC had hit the exits and with AIB being within weeks of almost total nationalisation this leaves only a single bidder; is this not correct? Can you please list the consortia left in the process.
The DTO platform for change listed 4 seperate metro lines
1. Tallaght via Kimmage
2. Lucan via Bluebell
3. Tara St to Tallaght via Finglas
4. Shanngannagh to the Airport3 of these lines have been scrapped and the fourth can be taken in three sections
1. Shanngannagh to Cherrywood – defered due to a suspect cost benefit basis
2. Cherrywood to Stephens Green – built as Luas and with by far the highest population density on the route
3. Stephens Green to Airport – Clearly Luas loadings in terms of population density.There is no question that delivering Luas will upset motorists and require rerouting of bus routes in the city centre; I would however ask why would someone take the 16 bus all the way from Rathfarnham to Dublin Airport when they could get off in Camden Street and interchange to Luas at Harcourt?
If people had a cross city Luas it would change journey behaviour dramatically.
The only roadspace I see on the entire route as being highly problematic is Phibsboro; the area around Cross Guns Bridge is already a significant pinch point; that area would require a tunnel from the disused canal bank to St Mobhi Road where a football pich exists for a tunnel site; this would require a tunnel of just over 1kms in length.
@Cathal Dunne wrote:
Well until it has a railway order, finalised the bidding process and finished all the other related works DART Underground cannot proceed. All the preliminary work for MN will have been finished by the end of this year, DART Underground will only be halfway through it by then.
That Martin Cullen and Noel Dempsey slowed up the DART underground project deliberately should have no bearing on the delivery of that project. This is clearly now an either or situation the money is not there for both. Dempsey got his white elephant M3, Cullen his White Elephant M9, Bertie his head in a cupboard. For Swords Luas would be a great result given even the vastly overscaled DTO document didn’t grant anything.
I completely endorse the concept of both architects and planners being hired in the short term to assess the longer term options and their retention into the medium term; there are surveyors but from I understand the individuals hired were restricted to those with experience restricted to high value commercial projects or very large urban regeneration schemes; they are highly respected individuals with impressive CVs; obviously an essential component given the make up of the portfolio and as such it was always correct to start by looking at the biggest exposures; there is however a need to look at the entire portfolio.
From what I can make out the markets have marked the foreign and urban commercial holdings to market; applied very heavy discounts to inner city development land but attributed virtually no value to development frontier residential land. In terms of establishing a worst case scenario and in light of the complete unreliability of any of the statements made by Lenihan Bros you can’t blame the markets for their scepticism; however the one phrase that sticks in my throat “they don’t get Ireland” may actually have a great relevance in terms of the development frontier landbank.
Someone will need to assess sites and design revised estate layouts along the lines of ‘outline consent’ level of design; as an example take a 10 acre holding in say Sallins; if this were broken up into a 10 year phased split of say 5 acres closest to the town being laid down as the ‘retained land’ where phases of units were designed and marketed through local agents and that the other 5 acres would be sold on as plots of land of an eighth of acre at say €50k – €75k a plot with an outline consent in place. The funds raised through the disposal of the less well situated land could be used to either pay down the interest on the NAMA bonds or kick start small phases when sufficient units were secured by deposits.
We need to forget about the boomier phase when 80,000 – 90,000 units were rolling off the line; I think it is reasonable to say that 40,000 units completed per year is long run average and where we should be aiming for; it is about 10,000 now and one wonders how many of these were bought off the plan 3-4 years ago.
What is proposed is not that people be forced to buy anything; it is simply that the government would ban one off houses on unzoned land and that NAMA would make available for sale in each town plots for sale of up to an eighth of an acre for people to do their own thing with; but bearing in mind these people would be in a very strong position to gain consent given that the land is zoned resi and it would be very difficult against over development of the subject plot and that they would be stregnthening the town.
If people are offered what they want; they will buy it and the most toxic elements of the NAMA portfolio that in many cases have no value at all can start to give a return to the exchequer.
Please confirm how giving people the right to build on zoned land will cost the architectural profession and construction industry anything; as a proportion of one off houses how many McMansions do you think were architect designed during Dick’s rural bubble? It was never the business of architects to haggle with local planners as to local need; you are design professionals not sociologists.
@Solo wrote:
One thing the Chinese claim to have invented is a “failsafe” nuclear reactor, to avoid 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl
Not so sure myself anything that says made in China is normally a poor copy and rarely does what it says on the tin.
Have you been to Asia recently?
Not quite; but what I can see as being a radical compromise would be that given the abundance of land where the basic services have been put in but not yet developed could be sold off to people in plots of say an eighth of an acre a pop; this would drain down NAMA lands whilst not forcing people into poorly designed schemes. Critically it delivers both the ability to self design and ensures that towns build population. It gives the exchequer via NAMA the revenue to provide services and protects ground water to a much greater degree by ensuring all effluent is going into the local authority sewers; it also cuts the usage of non-national roads which are going to see their budgets completely murdered over the next decade.
The argument often put forward for large detached houses is that they are a symbol of attainment; the environmental lobby point out the damage that one offs do on so many levels from contamination of ground water to unsustainable transport patterns and increased cost of providing services. Well this hits both allowing people to have large houses in places that people can even see them; forget the pathetic national solidarity bond paying a pathetic 1% coupon, only an idiot would have bought them; building your one off on a NAMA plot and employing the most underemployed sector in the economy; now thats patriotism that doesn’t hurt the wallet.
@Cathal Dunne wrote:
resources to upgrade our antiquated water infrastructure.
The focus on Metro North is infuriating. The cost of Irish Nationwide Building Society is twice what Metro North will cost, Anglo is 15 times the cost and similar multiples on other failed banks.
Take a step back and ask why the banks failed?
It was very simple as an industry they consistently factored in unrealistic demand targets, ignored the potential for cost over-runs; relied upon the availibility of cheap credit for ever and did no detailed due diligence of any of the projects they were lending to. The taxpayer is being asked to lend Metro North €3bn and the latest I can deduce is this: The RPA estimate in their 2010 CBA that intra-journey maximum hourly demand would peak in the moderate growth scenario at 3,640 at Northwood stop; this includes 666 passengers that would have boarded at two stations (Bellinstown & Lissenhall) that have been axed from the route by ABP; in addition the Seatown stop has been axed which contributed over 700 of these passengers; this station has a section of its catchment that is equidistant to DART at Malahide; so one wonders how much further leakage would occur from passengers who probably use dart anyway but would certainly find DART easier than using one of the other Swords stops on Luas North. The true capacity required is less than 3,000 people per hour maximum.
Luas can carry 6,000 an hour or future proof the project for 15 – 20 years. As Keynes said in the long term we are all dead!
@Cathal Dunne wrote:
It’s Metro North or nothing, you have to understand. If it’s cancelled after going through such a long process then there is next to no chance of any other major project in Ireland proceeding. Nobody involved in infrastructure will want to deal with us if we’re shown to be flakey on Metro North. It could also open us up to being sued by the PPP consortia for making them enter a tendering process on false premises.
Until the contract gets signed its a business risk; once Lenihan Bros depart the new government will do exactly what the last government did in 1997 and review everything; remember the last government was to build three Luas lines that actually joined up. But Mammy had other ideas……
actually it’s about money being available for essential services
I agree that until the new government has actually seen the books and can say with all certainty what the true costs of the number of ‘off balance sheet’ PPPs that have been entered into on the basis of rolling up interest into the long term then no decisions can be made. From there a hierarchy of services needs to be drawn up in areas such as health, education, policing, IDA, Enterprise Ireland etc and then look at transport; if there is no tax base there is no way to pay back the loans.
If one project is to be built it must be Dublin Underground so that NAMA can break ground on the maximum number of sites with toxic loans such as Adamstown with 9,000 undeveloped plots, the four DART lines have infinitely more penetration.
@StephenC wrote:
@onq wrote:
Fair play to Ciaran Cuffe. I was speaking with him a few days after his appointment and I suggested that something as simple as this was the type of decision that the Govt/public service should have very little problem making. Too often there seems to be this overwhelming sense of inertia among the public service. In fairness to him, he agreed about the measure (a very important one for the growing number of cyclists in the country) and here we are a few months later.
Its not all bad news from the Glasrai 🙂
Stephen like you I was also a student of Ciaran at DIT; he is a smart guy, has very strong presentational skills and unlike the historical traiblazers of the party like Maire Mullarney he understands markets and the greater global game and the need for the green movement to work from the inside to effect real change.
The only issue that Ciaran ever promoted on this board that caught my attention was his very catchy- ‘Join the dots campaign’ of linking the two disparate Luas networks.
What we got from the Green Party in Government was
1. A motorway to Tuam with a design spec of up to 50,000 AADT and probable AADT of as low as 5,000 at one section of it
2. A metro project that may cost €3bn but only have a maximum intra journey demand level of 3,000 passengers per hour under the moderate i.e. likely growth projection; when Luas can carry 6,000 per hour.One of the reasons why 2011 is a year of hope for me is that Ciaran and the Lenihan Bros he lodged with for the last 4.5 years i.e. the most economically destructive era in the history of the state will be gone. If the Greens had of stayed out it would have been a mere 2 by-elections to Head in Cupboard Bertie being chucked out and that would have been a long time before Lenihans gauranteed the unsubordinated anglo debt and then left Anglo to keep making bad loans unmonitored. Then the Greens could have joined a more suitable coalition that would not have built motorways to Tuam at the expense of the Dart Underground.
The other reasons are that the caravan of negative media coverage has moved on away from Ireland’s problems and the data coming out of the US indicates a very strong recovery is gaining traction there to compliment China, South Asia, India and Latin America; Ireland is very well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities this will create; earnings on the S & P are forecast to hit an all time record this year driven by IT, Finance and Healthcare, 3 industries we are disproportionately weighted in; once the ministerial clowns exit stage left confidence can start to grow again.
@onq wrote:
Let’s hope the fallout from the Australian floods, including restricting supplies of coal used for power generation and steel production worldwide dosn’t do down one of the few performing “western” economies left in the world and tip us all into a massive Depression for ten years.
Whilst the Australian floods are a real tragedy and probably the first example of climate change doing an Aussie boomerang with the carbon returning to the point on earth from where it came; with a lot of interest; I wouldn’t be too worried that a flood in Queensland will sink the global recovery; all that happened was that the hot money on the ASX transferred to the Bovspa in Brazil who produce a similar amount of steel and coal to a lesser degree. Initial estimates place the flood damage at $1bn US; trailers on stilts damage a lot less severly than masonery homes with plaster finishes. Of a lot more concern is the steady rise in oil prices which combined with governments needing to raise duty to balance the books has the capacity to slow struggling economies down a lot further.
Also, the following words and phrases are forbidden:
Any TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)That is certainly going to happen; RPA, NRA, HSE, SoD, HIC (head in cupboard)
Can you either post the drawings of the RO alignment and the alleged draft alignment; both in pdf form or specific weblinks to indiviudal drawings or withdraw your comments which are immature in the extreme and add nothing to the discussion.
They certainly know how to fight their corner; it would be a very brave politico to take them on; that said I think funding constraints will leave RTE with a very clear choice; they either soldier on with their existing facilities with the odd refurb here and there or bite the bullet; Ireland per capita sustains one of the best resourced state media companies but as the states resources decline that becomes more difficult; an independent funding stream through a JV with a solvent never near NAMA outfit with the funds to deliver the project may ensure key programming elements can be planned for into the medium term; that is not a luxury that RTE currently have.
The choice boils down to a question if they value their location more than their independence; what I liked about the location of Irishtown was that it is far from a bad location and would suit a lot of RTE staff who seem to live in Sandymount and Ballsbridge in disproportionate numbers.
Difficult it would be!!
You did introduce the Pembroke and Gardiner estates for discussion as justification for one of housing; the requirements of estate led development are far more onerous than planning consents and I have to say dealing with the contemporary estates such as Grosvenor and Howard De Walden they are a very positive influence on how an urban environment develops; not saying that City of Westminster is an easy planning department it certainly isn’t but the estates are even more rigourous in ensuring that all development on their patch adds to the estate. You simply cannot compare a planning free for all with a well planned estate its like trying to compare Penneys with Brown Thomas.
Nama has inherited a portfolio of bad loans mostly development land loans, they need to see three things happen
1. A lot of their own land holdings dezoned and returned to agricultural use on conacre agreements which can then be rezoned on proper planning grounds over the next 50 years.
2. Portfolio managment freedom to dispose of selcted investmentproperties to ensure that funds required to develop the best located holdings exist without further burdening the taxpayer and as such create employment and act as a balance sheet neutral stimulus programme
3. No development on unzoned land being able to undermine their strategy of stablising all property markets as quickly as is possible.
Make no mistake unless the full Nama strategy is implemented it will fail; if Nama fails the taxpayer is on the hook for in excess of €50bn; that would break the entire economy. It is that simple and they will only succeed by offering what people want, be it fourth generation offices, new shopping and distribution and a mix of residential options including high end flats and detached houses. There has been enough free for all destruction over the past decade it is time to plan the future.
Seeing as you add nothing to the discourse other than a loo; do you object to the 200m distance between the Heathrow Express and the Bakerloo line? which is the shortest of the Paddington interchanges.
A bad example for you perhaps, not for me.
Your summary of the characteristics of the Georgian house encompasses many of the characteristics of once off housing.A one off house cannot by definition form part of a terrace; a one off house is never subject to superior consent in terms of design; no Georgian Square was ever derided for poor design quality.
I have pointed out that without once off and self build houses the housing market would collapse even more.
Once off houses are what is keeping what’s left of the construction sector going.
You appear to have ignored this “market implication”.You cannot ignore a salient point and then accuse me of spinning.
What keeps any market going is demand, people need places to live; when the market collapses you act in the national interest to direct demand to the most relevant supply; there are almost 250,000 unsold completed or part completed units in schemes where site preparation works have been completed; taking the medium term average demand at 40,000 units per year that is over 6 years supply. Getting things built in the right place must over-ride flawed planning concepts such as rural need
No-one wants to buy the NAMA landbank now and NAMA shouldn’t be selling it now.
The buyers have no money and NAMA will only realise a tithe of the value of the land.Land markets are on their knees because despite a six year supply overhang, houses continue to be built on unzoned land further undercutting the market.
Low interest rate mortgages for 10 years, targeted retrofit grants for carbon neutral/sustainable features, all sound good to me.
Both ends of the yield curve are getting steeper 0n International markets, mortgage rates will be 7% within a couple of years once the IMF risk premium is applied to retail finance; I don’t disagree with tax breaks on green features between Kingspan and glen dimplex there is a direct link between tax breaks and further employment within the state, unlike the car scrappage scheme.
Expecting to legislate your way out of this mess and ignore market realities is just not going to work.
Expecting someone to buy sites of land from NAMA in locations that have no amenities seems dangerously naive.
And to suggest that allowing people to exercise their rights under the planning process undermines NAMA is nonsense.
Instead it behoves NAMA to look at each site of land and see what they can do to make it more appealing to the market.The IMF are signing the cheques that is the result of the market realities of throwing out best practice planning policies and introducing a rezoning free for all in the form of cumman divy ups and the introduction of ‘rural need’ planning consents. Adding supply to an already over supplied market can have only one effect further falls in price; do not forget the stress tests on the banks only allowed for a 5% default rate on mortgages, if 33% of demand continues to disapear into one off housing the prices falls will continue and more people will drop their house keys into the local AIB en route to the airport.
I guess a pretty simple calculation would be
UCD * graduates per year * 40
DIT * graduates per year * 40= Total graduates
I’d imagine over time the numbers who graduated from college abroad and practice hear and those who graduated here and went to pastures new would be about equal.
Then get ARB numbers and divide by the number of grads.
I suspect anyone who spent that amount of time studying would be loathe to give it up; but who knows….
The Pembroke and Gardiner Estates were developed plot by plot in terraces on building leases; i.e. you had the right to build a house the design of which was at the absolute discretion of the landlord. Very bad example.
Are you going to deal with the market implications of undermining demand for the Nama landbank or keep spinning spuriously?
Do not confuse urban infill with development on unzoned land.
The continuation of over one third of planning permissions being granted in respect of unzoned land is a clear threat to recovery of the property markets; in case you have forgotten via NAMA, the taxpayer is the largest owner of residential development land probably globally and certainly on a per capita basis.
The continued destabalisation of the property markets by the Government is unacceptable as are poor urban design standards in suburban locations. However until such time as residential land markets recover there is no opportunity to introduce better design standards.
