CityLiving: A couple who moved out of their city centre apartment recently told City Living they were afraid their two year old would either throw herself off their balcony or tumble down several flights of the stone stairwell .
When Lillian and John bought the apartment six years ago its suitability for children was bottom of their priority list. Its main attraction was its proximity to their favourite pub - Conways on Parnell Street. For several years most of the occupants of their apartment block were young, free and childless tenants and owner occupiers with healthy social lives. "Let's just say the landscape has changed quite a bit since then," says Lillian. "Since we had our little one , the block has become full of young children. There were two families with three children on our corridor . Both were being supplemented by social welfare and couldn't afford anywhere bigger . A single guy we knew downstairs was so horrified at having to listen to the baby next door screaming at night and at tripping over toys at night in the corridor, he moved out. I think all the children living around him were cramping his style because he felt guilty about having late night parties.
"We would have felt the same before we had our daughter but our perspective has changed somewhat. We think families with children have every right to live in apartment blocks but the problem was that ours wasn't safe for children."
They lived in an early-1990s development built which was built for investors and has long dark cavernous corridors, cramped apartments with little storage and no play area for children.
"Washing clothes in the apartment was a nightmare." says Lillian. " We used to have to drape wet clothes over doors and radiators in an effort to dry them. In the end we were afraid it would affect the baby's health. She slept in our room for the first six months and we used the second single room as a junk room. But as she grew older we moved her into the single room room and felt guilty she was sleeping in the middle of such a dreadful mess . One day she tripped over the cord of the vacuum cleaner and screamed the house down. The last straw came when we found her trying to get up onto a chair on the balcony. We decided there and then to move."
With the semi-detached house with gardens becoming a relic of the past since the high density guidelines were introduced, the planners' vision is that Dublin will grow upwards instead of out and eventually families will embrace apartment living in line with other European countries. Many local authority development plans now stipulate that 25 per cent of apartments in a scheme should be family sized ie not less than 750 sq ft. Some more recent apartment schemes are being built to cater for families with laundry facilities, large open play areas and more spacious apartments but by and large we are lagging far behind other European countries and America in terms of apartment design.
The reality is that most of the three-bed 90 sq m apartments are being bought by single people and investors, and the suburban two storey with gardens is still the family choice. People are moving out to commuter towns rather than upwards to high rise apartments in a bid to find affordable accommodation.
Most of the families currently living in apartments are not there by choice.With the softening of the rental market, landlords are more amenable to renting to social welfare tenants with children - something which many avoided during boom time but often the apartments are unsuitable for children.
Property management consultant Michael Noonan believes that the terms of most apartment leases almost prohibit children.
"They are not supposed to make noise, and run around unsupervised, and from an insurance point of view playgrounds are astronomical. so many have no real areas to play and common areas tend to get damaged. They tend to be stuck in caged environments, playing in halls, in lifts and on stairs ."
In one well know docklands apartment scheme children - most of whom come from the social housing element of the scheme - are not allowed to play on the grass because they are disturbing the residents of the private apartments nearby - mostly young professionals.
"But children can also bring something to a place," says Noonan. "Apartment blocks can be sterile and people often don't get to know their neighbours but when there are kids around adults are are more likely to get chatting. The children might be the bane of the caretaker's life but it's nice to see the different nationalities playing and integrating ."
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray, believes apartment life for children can be "double edged" . "On the one hand it can be easier for them to to form friendships and maybe on some level it can be safer because there might be a shared area or corridor where they can be easily observed. If they are living in a house it might not be as easy to let them out if there's a busy road and they might be more cut off from other children.
"On the other hand there may be more demands on them not to run about, not to shout and to be quieter which can be tough."
