Seán Keyes
@Keyes
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Dublin via London via Limerick
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Let’s CPO the 17 golf courses inside the M50 and build 540,000 homes and end the housing crisis and be legends.
What if we took a 160 acre golf course and repurposed it for housing and saved 95% of all the trees? Now you have 40,000 people living on two future light rail stops with a wonderful tree-lined dense walkable neighborhood
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My STOP WASTING SCARCE CITY SPACE agenda. 1. Cars seem important because theyre bulky and everywhere. But they transport sod-all. Only 28% of Dublin journeys. One lane: 2,000 people per hour by car, or 14,000 by bike. Close car lanes and watch the traffic evaporate. Thread…
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This is a nice piece from
@jburnmurdoch
summarising recent research on market rate housing. [free to read]
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Though Ireland is the eighth least-densely populated country in the EU, it has the fourth-longest commuting time
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Right beside a Dart stop, on the sea, 20 mins from town. Could be 100 homes. A comprehensive land tax would end a lot of this nonsense
Dublin City Council owns this 4400 sq m site beside Clontarf Road station and were leasing it to Westwood gym as an overflow car park for €35k/year. The lease is up and what does DCC want to do? Offer it to them as a car park again for 20 more years. 🤦♂️
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The problem is that locals people can organise against this; impossible to organise people who may or may not need to move to apartments in Dundrum in 2025
Imagine Dundrum Public Meeting last night in Taney Parish Hall about the proposed Fast Track Dundrum Village SHD for 881 Apartments. Full house 🏆
@donalodonovan
@PatKennyNT
@rteliveline
@gordondeeg
@thejournal_ie
@breakingnewsie
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We don’t build a metro because it’s nicer or because it’s faster. We build it because of its capacity. Dublin buses move about 2,500-7,500 people per lane per hour; metros move 20,000 to 80,000 per direction per hour. More capacity = more scope for housing in central Dublin.
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Interesting piece on how booming Sydney (population 5.3m) reduced rents by 7% over four years by building 34k homes per year. To get homes built, it liberalised planning rules.
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Ireland is victim of a bad metaphor. 🧵
The metaphor is that cities are like a balloons: squeeze them at one end and they expand at the other.
But that's not how cities works. When development gets restricted, it doesn't get diverted elsewhere. It just goes away.
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Why is there so little fuss over this hate crime bill? It’s incredibly broad.
“Upon such evidence being given, and a warrant granted, the guards can enter your home, search every person there, seize every single electronic device in the house, your phones, your laptops, your tablets, those of your partner, children’s phones, they can take anything,
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Let's give out about planning! It’s hard to argue that Irish planning is bad, because your evidence is things that *don’t* exist, but should. So, here are some things that don't exist here, but do exist in places with better planning setups. 🧵
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“I’ve always been suspicious about those arguments,” says Collison. “They smack of something that suggests the laws of economics apply everywhere except housing.”
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This is Ireland’s fate unless we rethink the way we do capital spending. Ireland’s model is like that of the UK and US, and unlike that of European countries. This is urgent, as Ireland embarks on a giant capital spending program
“When Britain builds infrastructure, whether that is railways, underground systems, trams or roads, we tend to pay more – a lot more in some cases – than other countries in Europe."
I'm quoted in
@Telegraph
on Britain's high transport build costs.
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Biggest thing we can do as Europeans is show leaders we understand the stakes around O&G sanctions, and accept them, and would be willing to go through a recession and higher cost of living as the price of helping Ukraine.
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This is getting out of hand — I’m on
@drivetimerte
in about 40 minutes to talk about the scourge that is urban golf
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Ireland's clumsy rent control system, has unsurprisingly resulted in a collapse in homes available for rent. Only 424 available in Dublin in August.
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This is such nonsense from the car parks guy. Dublins public transport is crap in large part because cars hog the road space. Fewer cars in the city makes it more attractive and makes transport more efficient, a win win
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"For every 100 homes available to rent thirteen years ago, there are just three on the market today."
Inside Ireland’s rental crisis: Surging prices, incoherent policies, and the build-to-rent debate
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This is the big solution: nationalise house building. Ok. We need 50k homes per year or so. The biggest house builder in the USA does 71k per year. Good luck with that!
The state could buy out one of the larger housing developers & create a state construction company - as suggested by
@RoryHearne
This would ensure we have a consistent rate of housing output to break the property bubble cycle & mitigate against procurement inflation.
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Have to be allowed to build 97 units per acre on a site within walking distance of the city. On a tram line. Good luck meeting our housing needs if you can’t
Planning permission refused for 97 build-to-rent apartments in Milltown
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159 homes in the most high demand part of the country? “No” said DCC, not if they’re for renters
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Moya Doherty: “I was available at the end of a phone at any time” — not sure this is how board oversight is meant to work
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Never forget: Ireland and the UK’s planning systems are weird outliers. Other countries don’t do it our way. Few places have worse housing outcomes
I dare you to make it to the end of this explanation of the UK's housing planning process without tearing your hair out of your skull:
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My problem with this is the idea that Dublin is fine the way it is. Dublin is a weirdly-shaped city and that’s got a lot to do with why it’s expensive.
It’s probably very hard for people who grew up glamorising cities with tall buildings to understand why tall buildings aren’t necessary, why Dublin’s Georgian & Victorian urban core is unique in all the right ways. Dublin deserves an adequate & progressive urban vision.
#Urbanism
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Disagree on this — the biggest bottleneck for public transport in Ireland is frequency and reliability, not cost. Eg Dublin bus’s €260m revenue from fares is best spent on more and faster buses
A tiny financial cost, a huge social, environmental and climatic gain. Make public transport free. Its the future. Go for it now. 👇
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Ireland with more Ukranian refugees per capita than any non former soviet country 💪
Close to 4 million Ukrainian refugees total, more refugees now living in Germany than in Poland and... 445 Ukrainians in Lichtenstein. Some interesting data there.
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Developers and international cuckoo funds, with the tacit backing of the FFG government, are engaged in a conspiracy to build dwellings in Ireland.
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News: if you ignore the cost of the land underneath them, houses are cheaper
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Banning demolition on embodied carbon grounds will result in more carbon emitted, higher housing costs, longer commutes and less walkable cities. That's because the embodied carbon accounting ignores emissions from transport.
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Ireland truly is the poster child for neoliberalism.
Excellent conversation earlier on inclusive growth.
Still struck by this chart from Prof. Brian Nolan versus what we sometimes tell ourselves.
From 1987 to 2019 Ireland had the largest growth in median real incomes and the largest fall in inequality of any developed economy.
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Parking. The big one! Minimum parking requirements make new developments more expensive and bake-in car dependency. One city centre parking space can accommodate a dock for 10 e-scooters. Take out a row of them and you’ve got a bike lane
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Urban golf. Golf is nice, but it’s not for cities. At average capacity, a golf course needs three acres per golfer. On the same space, you could fit 225 nice mid-rise homes. It’s a no-brainer.
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This is good from
@ronanlyons
. BTR built bigger apartments than have ever been built in Ireland, by the tens of thousands. Now we're seemingly about to end it
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My pet theory is common law derived planning in Anglophone countries (more uncertain) vs Napoleonic planning in Europe (less uncertain)
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Todays the day: the last day of covid quarantine, on what should have been the ninth day of paternity leave. I’m off now to meet the wean. Thanks to the good people of Twitter for keeping me company
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Want to stick it to the landlords? Build as many homes as possible. Below are filings by IRES REIT and Invitation Homes, two big landlords.
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Some golfers took me to task over my golf tweets: ‘why not build over soccer pitches?’ So I had to justify myself in excruciating detail. Thanks to twitter you get to see my workings:
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Looking forward to going on
@ClaireByrneLive
tomorrow morning to talk institutional investors in housing with
@RoryHearne
. Tune in from 10.30
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That’s the stuff: hundreds of lovely new homes on a fairly small site in Griffith Avenue
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Not sure whether this is true, but I heard before that Copenhagen shifted from car dominance to bike dominance by removing 4 per cent of its city centre parking spaces every year. Squeeze them out!
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In Ireland and elsewhere, tougher planning rules, fewer homes and higher housing costs
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I stayed in one of these things for a month for about €400. In a good location. Not all small homes are bad homes. Maybe let’s think about legalising them?
Would you stay in an apartment in Japan like this for $300/mo?
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Thread: TALL BUILDINGS ARE GOOD SOMETIMES. Gentle density is nicer than tower density: more liveable, more beautiful, cheaper to build per unit. But it doesn’t follow that tall buildings are never the way to go.
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Unobjectionable 🤝 200 units/hectare
This is a brand new building in Dusseldorf. Good architecture seems to be making a comeback in Germany
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We're dismantling the one part of the market that was delivering homes -- large scale build to rent.
Allianz pauses investments in Irish residential property market
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@the_transit_guy
You’re right but I suspect it’s because Ireland was dirt poor during modernist urban planners’ heyday in 50s-70s.
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The latest one is that fixing the housing shortage by building houses is impractical, because it would require building too many houses.
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The aspiration is for it to cost €500-600m/km for the 16km of underground. The global average per
@alon_levy
is €250m/km.
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This is an obvious place to start. So many wide one way streets in Dublin. Clip them a bit and make cycling much more convenient
In 2008, France made it law that practically all 30km/h zones had to be made two way for cycling.
In Paris, this meant 200km of (typically quiet) streets were unlocked for new routes, helping cycling to be the most direct and convenient option. And it cost hardly anything to do.
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This will be one to watch. If Ireland did what they did — allow the development of small apartment blocks everywhere *by right* — it would be transformative
BREAKING: Toronto City Council has voted 18-7 to end single-family only exclusionary zoning, allowing duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in all residential areas of the city. They become the largest city in North America to do so.
📍Toronto 🇨🇦
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When we banned bedsits and co-living during a giant boom in urban jobs.
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This is a big example, but there are 100,000 small examples of things that aren’t built because of planning rules.
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Great stuff! Better thought of as an anti-traffic policy than an anti-car policy. Will stop us wasting scarce city space on a woefully inefficient transport method. Will free up space to move many multiples of people through the city in the same time.
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The RTE board’s remuneration committee had specific terms of reference. It failed to comply with them
NEW: RTÉ pay committee chair, Moya Doherty, didn’t attend remuneration meetings for almost four years
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Making this floorplan legal. Pro: unlocks tens of thousands of homes in locations with short commutes, great amenities, and lower emissions, at low construction cost. Con: people who choose to live there would have no window in their bedroom.
Converting office space into beautiful, functional housing isn’t easy — but “Easy” isn’t why I got into this gig.
Working on this 4 bed unit now. Deep floor plates are a challenge but this layout is perfect for young families.
Let’s unf***ck our cities!
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If we want more affordable housing we need to lift bureaucratic and other obstacles to building houses. Blocking BTR won't help those who need social housing. Blocking Dublin won't help Sligo. Blocking Dublin certainly won't help Dublin.
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Great stuff — now to build densely along the lines
Good news for Cork. Cabinet today approved the purchase of 90 new battery electric carriages for delivery in 2026. They are ear-marked for the new metropolitan rail network we are planning for Cork, as well as providing new services to Wicklow town, Kildare and on the Dart lines.
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Mumbai allowed apartment buildings to be taller. This resulted in 28% more apartments and a 29% decrease in apartment prices. Apartments also got 18% smaller, offset by more shared amenity spaces
Geetika Nagpal
JMP: "Scaling Heights: Affordability Implications of Zoning Deregulation in India"
Website:
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Overdevelopment
25 Mount Pleasant Avenue Lower, Dublin 6
- Derelict since 2016
- Permission granted for apartments in 2019. Sold again in 2022
- Last week
@dubcitycouncil
rejected a new application for a 3 storey building of 7 apartments, calling it “overdevelopment”
#derelictdublin
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Soccer: 27 players per game, 2 hours per game, So 5* 25* 2 / 7 = 39 person hours of football per day. 2 acre pitch so 20 person hours of football per acre. SOCCER IS 8X MORE SPACE EFFICIENT THAN GOLF. Next: how many people really use our urban graveyards??
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“Does not address a housing need for larger sized dwellings in the Liberties and the North Inner City while Council concerns over daylight and sunlight standards and visual impacts were not satisfactorily addressed” — every separate development must solve every type of shortage
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Here’s what happens when it’s legal and simple to build small apartments:
In Tokyo earlier this week, I was wandering around Shimo-Kitazawa - a hipster neighbourhood - and I saw this estate/letting agent looming out of the vintage clothes shops like a lighthouse. Let's check out what rents are like in Japan's equivalent to Dalston:
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Many European countries did stuff like this after the war. What they didn’t do was mandate that new apartments be luxurious, and expensive to build!
In 1965, Sweden was experiencing a housing crisis - their economy had industrialised, their population had grown & people were flooding to urban areas.
Their government started an ambitious housing program to solve this problem.
9 years later, they had built ONE MILLION HOUSES!
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And the forecast population growth is currently second highest in EU. It’s why copying middle of the road European policy (our go-to policy playbook) won’t work with housing.
Did not realise this….
Ireland’s population grew by 46% since 1990 compared to the EU average of 6%. 🤯
Is this rate of population growth slowing down or speeding up ??
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Enjoying this density map tool. You can see, In communist cities, they built towers at the edge of town and left low-rise housing and factories in the centre of town, because they didn’t have land price signals telling them that was a dumb idea. Here’s Katowice next to Munich
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Thats the stuff! Mad thing is if we upgraded zoning along rail and captured the increase in land values, it would cover for the construction costs of the rail. Scope for huge quantities of high quality accessible housing, profitable for developers, no cost to state. win-win-win
Fascinating high density scheme in Hackney Downs along the railway offering 79 units and 45,000 sqft of commercial space (no net loss?) on a 0.4 ha site. About 200dph gross atop a sunken commercial podium with huge light wells going 3 storeys deep. Never seen anything like it!
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This is the study that’ll finally convince housing supply skeptics.
🚨Wake up babe, new study of market-rate housing just published🚨 (Spoiler: it's a banger) 🧵
Xiaodi Li found that when a new luxury apartment is built in NYC:
📉 nearby house prices fall
📉 nearby rents fall
🧑🍳more restaurants open up &
⚖��low-rent units do not see rent hikes
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Everyone is generically “pro housing”, but there are always lots strongly opposed to specific housing schemes.
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Peak performance.
5-6 storeys, high plot coverage, continuous build line, 80:20 residential-to-shops. Arcaded ground floor, simple rectilinear facade pattern, stock brick with cheap stucco ornament in a loosely Renaissance style. Mature plane trees, subdued tasteful street furniture.
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this would be significant
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In the best connected and highest demand locations, it’s a sin not to build densely. And yes this does mean tall buildings
25% permanently affordable, zero operating carbon, and first-rank designers. Density plus ambition is quite the recipe.
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Much better idea. Public lidos are great. The one in on the waterfront in Copenhagen is the heart of the city in summer.
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And developers paying 32% more to build a townhouse than the average of Paris Munich Amsterdam, according to Turner and Townsend. Hard construction costs, margins and prelims are all the same. The last explanations standing are planning and productivity
The state is paying up to €138,000 more to build a home than other European countries building similar affordable housing, a confidential Land Development Agency (LDA) report has shown
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This idea that planning rules are good, simply because they’re democratic. It makes no sense.
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Great thread — I’d be pointing the finger at the Central Bank of Ireland’s implementation of euro capital requirement rules. Banks won’t lend for anything but the safest projects.
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Banning small homes has the same effect as banning cheap food. It hurts the people it’s intending to help
I know small apartments are not for everyone, but its difficult to see sub $500/mo apartments near major train stations in Tokyo proper and not wonder how much less of an issue the housing crisis could have been if these were legal to build in most US cities.
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The big advantage of metrolink is capacity — it can move up to 50k per direction per hour. That in turn lets us build hundreds of thousands of homes along the line. Luas would be a small fraction of that
This is a very interesting proposal that seems to make a lot of sense and would cost a fraction of the misconceived Metrolink plan ...
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Publishing the first part of a big thing tomorrow on transit oriented development which, it seems to me, is our best and most realistic way out of the housing crisis. Stay tuned!
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Amazing how fast things can change if the city commits to it
👀 Watch this
🔊 Listen carefully
Realize that these people were in cars 😱
Only 2 years ago! 🤯
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A *75km* underground high speed metro for *4bn*
Istanbul Metro's Line M34 or HızRay (Fast Rail), a 75km underground suburban high speed metro arc consisting of 13 underground stations and 140 kph trains. The whole project is proposed to open in 2030 and built for €4 billion. Now on the cusp of staring construction.
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Normal system
Plan for 1,600 apartments in Drumcondra is blocked by High Court
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In which
@ronanlyons
trawls through the records and finds, of the 7800 build to rent homes studied, at least 90% are occupied.
The build-to-rent debate: What the data says about price, supply and occupancy rates
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I had been curious about this for a long time, so I wrote about it. The WRU takes in as much money as the IRFU. Why are its finances in chaos?
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From
@ronanlyons
, the 56% of Dublin households too rich for subsidy and not rich enough for market rate housing. Getting the market price down is the only show in town IMO. Alternative is a queue/lottery for subsidised housing, which is frankly an insult.
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Pleased to be in
@Mickbyrne101
's interesting piece on the politics of NIMBY. I would add this: left NIMBYs tend to be suspicious of market rate for what they think are good reasons; the problem is that the reasons are in fact not good. e.g. "housing is inherently local"
How have progressives come to be positioned as anti-supply NIMBYs? A recent episode of
@RebootPod
with
@Keyes
got me thinking about this issue
@PhilLawton
@gavinjdaly
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Telling that it's not even part of the conversation, but that DART line has the capacity to support tens of thousands more homes. Local councillors say no, of course
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