The Government has no hope of tackling the homelessness crisis unless it faces up to a number of difficult but fundamental issues.
If we aspire to making it possible for people to own their own homes or to rent them at affordable rates, we must increase the supply of serviced land for building them in places where people want to live and work.
Market forces by themselves will not increase the supply of land, even when coupled with tax incentives and disincentives. We need statutory agencies with effective and speedy powers to compulsorily purchase land which is or can be serviced near urban centres so that it can be developed under long building leases as affordable homes and/or apartments.
Compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) are currently hopelessly difficult to operate. The Law Reform Commission has published a report and draft legislation which would modernise CPO procedures. But much more is needed. The demand for homebuilding is already there. It is on the supply side that there is widespread failure.
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We need dedicated agencies (not somnolent behemoths like local authorities) to operate CPO powers effectively. Instead of extending urban sprawl indefinitely into green belts, we need to jump-start active urban renewal. We need a fresh approach to building densities and standards to make commercial homebuilding more affordable while profitable. We do not need all CPOs to be confirmed by An Bord Pleanála (soon to be An Coimisiún Pleanála ). The construction industry needs access to capital and credit.
We need positive urban planning backed up by CPO measures. We cannot afford to leave solving the home building shortage to market forces and passive local authority involvement in the form of zoning, coupled with the granting of casual planning permissions for commercial homebuilding. Laissez-faire planning controls simply do not work. Positive urban planning needs a revolution in our policies, systems and administration.
Local authorities – as planning authorities and housing authorities – have decayed into sclerotic prefectures of the Custom House with an ornamental fringe of elected representatives. The system of development plans, national planning frameworks, planning guidelines and enforcement though the Office of the Planning Regulator is dysfunctional. It doesn’t create supply; it inhibits it. It is like a child in the rear of a car earnestly spinning a plastic steering wheel on his car seat.
The endless delays are all the more tragic when you recall that O’Connell Street was carefully rebuilt under positive urban renewal planning in the aftermath of the Rising and the Civil War
In theory, local councils can compulsorily purchase land for building. In practice, they don’t do so on any appreciable scale. The purse strings are tightly drawn in the hands of central government. In theory, local authorities can use CPO powers to assemble sites for inner-city development and renewal; in practice, they don’t. At best, they nibble at the edges of the problem.
Take O’Connell Street Upper. There have been plans to redevelop large swathes of the principal thoroughfare of our capital city lying between it and Moore Street for the past 30 years. But it has become, in large part, a derelict, mostly empty wasteland. In 2003, the then city manager signed a CPO for some of the land to jump-start its renewal. A challenge to his order, later confirmed by the Planning Board, was fought through the court system. In 2007, the Supreme Court eventually heard and dismissed the challenge. The court ruled that the CPO was valid even if the council did not propose to redevelop the land itself and even if the exact nature of the proposal had not been finalised.
Development of the site, which has been vacant for nearly 50 years and is in danger of becoming an urban buddleia nature reserve, was finally approved by An Bord Pleanála last year. The developer was given up to 12 years to start work.
The endless delays are all the more tragic when you recall that O’Connell Street was carefully rebuilt under positive urban renewal planning in the aftermath of the Rising and the Civil War under the guidance of a visionary city architect, Horace O’Rourke. On Dublin’s quays, the site of the Ormond Hotel that featured in Ulysses is now completing a decade of gap-toothed dereliction, although it is due for redevelopment. The famous James Joyce house at 15 Ushers Island appears in danger of harm, standing as it does, forlornly beside other Georgian buildings which badly need their upper floors rebuilt for context.
Farther away along the quays, there is another small block of dereliction in the form of property acquired by the city council for the possible expansion of the Abbey Theatre, but left to decay for a decade of indecision. Is all of this and the countless other patches of urban dereliction in our capital the responsibility of anybody? Does anyone with any real power care at all? Would any European city tolerate such decay and dereliction? Would any continental city concentrate its few energies, as ours does, on the low hanging fruit of bus and bicycle lanes while the urban fabric decays all around it?
All of Ireland’s cities and larger towns need positive urban planning. That needs a revolution in government thinking.
