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Local authorities built only 394 homes in 2017 by Mel Reynolds   MINISTER FOR FINANCE Paschal Donohoe set out the stall for Social Housing in Budget 2018: “I am allocating a total of €1.83bn for housing in 2018. Some 3,800 new social homes will be built next year by local authorities and approved housing bodies…1”. In fact Local Authorities are building a fraction of this figure. Gains and Losses Purpose-built new homes are an essential component of permanent social housing provision. But they are not the only component. Additional permanent stock can come from a number of sources. New and second-hand private-home purchases (acquisitions) and so-called ‘Part V’ housing – 10% of schemes acquired from or built by developers, all add to permanent stock. Official tallies also include ‘voids reclaimed’ as additional homes. These are typically short-term vacant local-authority properties brought back into stock but counted as additional homes. Leases can also count as, temporary, housing ‘solutions’, and are similarly included as additional stock. There are losses to stock to be considered. For example, just looking at new homes completed last year: Dublin City Council (DCC) completed 139 new-builds and purchased 58 ‘turnkey’ new homes from developers. However, DCC demolished 148 and sold 54 existing local authority dwellings, leaving a lower net figure2. Nevertheless, new-build social housing illustrates how the state is managing public resources and delivering new permanent stock on state land. Local Authorities own zoned land with a capacity for 48,724 dwellings nationwide yet they used just 0.8% of this state land capacity for new-builds, 394 units3. But state capacity is even greater. Nama-controlled land currently has a capacity for 65,399 dwellings. 10% Part V social housing could be provided, giving an additional 6,540 social homes.   New Builds The Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government (DHPLG) produces detailed new-build social housing data. Established as part of the ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ housing strategy in 2016, quarterly ‘Social Housing Construction Status Reports’ currently catalogue 930 projects with a ‘pipeline’ of 14,813 new homes, noting location, stage of delivery, number of units, and if units are being purchased or built by Local Authorities or Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs). These reports include two categories of new homes as ‘builds’. New-builds are purpose-built new social homes procured directly by Local Authorities and AHBs. So-called ‘turnkey’ units are new homes purchased from developers (acquisitions) and are somewhat contentious as the state is competing with private buyers in the open market. Both types are, however, additional permanent stock with security of tenure.   2017 Output In 2017 Local Authorities built 394 homes and purchased 386 ‘turnkey’ new homes from developers. AHBs built 270 new homes and purchased 654 ‘turnkey’ new home acquisitions4. Excluding purchases, there were 664 new-builds nationwide in 2017. 375 new social homes were built in the City and County of Dublin and, of this, the four Dublin Local Authorities completed just 232 new-builds. In 2017 there were 44,802 on Co Dublin housing waiting lists.   2018 Output In 2018 so far Local Authorities have built 364 social homes and purchased 123 ‘turnkey’ acquisitions from developers nationwide5. AHBs delivered 113 new-builds and purchased 200 ‘turnkey’ new homes. Excluding new home purchases, there were 477 new-build social homes in the first six months of 2018 from all sources. Dublin Local Authorities completed 145 newbuilds in six months. Local Authorities own enough vacant zoned land in Dublin to accommodate 29,377 dwellings but have used 0.5% of this capacity for new-builds so far this year.   Conclusion There were 10,694 subsidised leases in the first six months of 2018, 22 leases for every newbuild in the country6. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) estimate that, in areas of high demand such as Co. Dublin, a subsidised lease is twice as costly as a Local Authority new-build on state land. In 2018 more than €900m per year will be spent on subsidise private-sector social rents, homeless services and other rent assistance programmes. DPER project more than €1.7bn will be spent per year on state rent assistance by 20227. There has been little increase in new-build social housing in Co Dublin, the area with the most acute housing need. New-build social housing output will need to increase increase four-fold to achieve Budget targets.   1. Budget 2018 speech delivered in Dáil by Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe #budget2018” Leinster Express; https://www.leinsterexpress.ie/news/news/275348/budget-2018-speech-delivered-in-dail-by-minister-paschal- donohoe-budget2018.html 2. Noac Performance Indicators Report 2017 (p13); http://noac.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NOAC Performance-Indicators-Report-2017.pdf 3. “State owns enough zoned land to build 114,000homes” Irish Times; https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/state-owns-enough-zoned-land-to-build-114-000-homes-1.3481853.Housing: land scarcity? – Eolas Magazine; http://www.eolasmagazine.ie/housing-land-scarcity 4. Minister Murphy publishes Social Housing Construction Status Report Q4 2017 – Rebuilding Ireland; http:// rebuildingireland.ie/news/ 5. Minister Murphy publishes Social Housing Construction Status Report Q2 2018 and details of Social Housing Output for Quarter 2 2018 | Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government; https://www.housing.gov.ie/housing/social-housing/construction/minister-murphy-publishes-social-housing-constructionstatusminister-murphy-publishes-social-housing-construction-status-report-q4-2017/ 6. Housing Data: 9 Oct 2018: Written answers (Kildare-Street.com) Q534- 537 incl.; https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2018-10-09a.1534 7. “Spending Review 2018 Current and Capital Expenditure on Social Housing Delivery Mechanisms – Daniel O’Callaghan and Paul Kilkenny , IGEES Unit and Housing, Planning and Local Government Vote” July 2018; https://static.rasset.ie/documents/news/2018/07/19.-current-andcapital-expenditure-on-social-housing delivery.pdf

”Nothing to see here” approach means Ireland’s Fire Safety Task Force was wrongly comprised, only looked at buildings over 6 storeys and assessed only half of the 226 buildings identified as at risk By Orla Hegarty and Lorcan Sirr   IT WAS PURE LUCK that the March 2015 fire in Millfield Manor in Kildare didn’t kill anyone. The luck factor was that the fire happened midafternoon when many people were out at work. In less than thirty minutes, a terrace of six timber-framed houses burned down. The next year, five reports into safety failings in Irish schools confirmed that the issues are not limited to housing. In 2017, a tower of social housing in London, Grenfell Tower, caught fire. A series of technical failings, including combustible cladding, resulted in more than 72 people losing their lives. A 2018 report found that their “current system of building regulations and fire safety is not fit for purpose and that a culture change is required”. The Irish response to these events – in a country where timber-frame houses are prevalent, and where construction has fewer controls than in the UK and no independent oversight – has effectively been ‘nothing to see here’. The then Minister for the Environment, Alan Kelly, commissioned a report into the Millfield Manor fire. It was due to be published in January 2016. The report eventually saw daylight in mid-2017, but only after a round of Freedom of Information requests. When he saw the report, Alan Kelly said it was not in accordance with the terms of reference. Significantly, the report didn’t look at failings in the regulatory system; and it referred homeowners in other estates back to their own architects and engineers, the very same people who had been waiting for official guidance from the report The 24-page document that was published largely restated existing regulations and offered advice on how to prevent fires; there was no mention of concerns about timber-frame construction, or the Department’s own report in 2003 that had warned about timber-frame construction which subsequently accounted for up to 30% of homes built in the boom and which make up a substantial proportion of new estates now under construction; and nor did the report use the houses as a case study, as it was claimed it was supposed to do. Councillor Cian O’Callaghan called the report a “spectacular failure”. Last year Minister Eoghan Murphy established a Task Force to carry out a review after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which was published in May of this year as ‘Fire Safety in Ireland’. The composition of the Task Force is worth noting. More than 80% of the Task Force who authored the report were civil or public servants with only three external members out of eighteen (one from SIPTU, one fire engineer and one architect). 45% of the membership came from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government itself who are responsible for fire safety regulations. Following Grenfell, the UK government established an independent expert advisory panel and this group have been reporting as the issues emerge. The terms of reference of the report pulled its punches with a very limited scope of reference. The most notable limitation was in the type of buildings that were to be examined in the report: only multiunit social housing and buildings “more than 6 storeys or more than 18m with external cladding or rainscreen systems” were to be examined (842 in total). This therefore ignored buildings up to five floors, critically excluding buildings such as schools, hospitals, shopping centres, student housing and even airports, as well as the thousands of apartments (many of timber frame construction) built during the boom where residents have been calling for a national audit of fire safety risks . In addition, the report offers reassurances about cladding, detection and alarms, without assessing the substantial risks of fire and smoke spread due to inadequate compartmentation and poor construction. In May the Fire Safety Task Force concluded “at this point the combination of contributory factors which gave rise to the Grenfell Tower tragedy do not appear to be present in buildings in Ireland”. It had identified 226 buildings where building owners were required to assess the fire safety risk because of their cladding, but there is no indication of where they are. Five hospitals have been named as the subject of a HSE investigation, although at the conclusion of the Task Force’s work fewer than half (47%) of the buildings identified as being at risk had even been technically assessed and in some cases no progress had been made because the building owner wasn’t identified. There is no duty to notify occupants of the buildings concerned. The locations are known to the local fire services in the 31 local authorities, but the Task Force compiling the report did not have this information. Indeed, finding information on fire safety is no easy task in Ireland. Each fire authority is obliged to keep at its offices a register of fire safety notices served by it and the register must be open to inspection by any person at all reasonable times. Try getting access to the register, however, and in many instances you are met with “why do you want to see it?”, “are you looking for something specific? ”and “you’ll have to make an appointment”, all of which are hardly in keeping with the spirit of a “public register”, but very much in line with the spirit of “nothing to see here”. Or maybe more accurately, “there may or may not be anything here to see, but we’re damned if we’re going to make it easy for you to find out”. Under the provisions of section 20(1) of the Fire Services Act 1981, fire authorities may issue a fire safety notice on the owner of a building if they are of the opinion the building is unsafe. Such notices can prohibit the use of the building or parts or it; direct the owner to carry out certain fire-safetyrelated works

Obfuscating high-rise with high density serves only deregulatory market-driven ideology by Gavin Daly Rule #101 of the neoliberal playbook – when faced with a housing supply crisis, attack the planning system! It has been thus at leasgt since Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s bouffant environment secretary in the 1980s, launched his famous broadside against the “jobs locked up in the dusty filing cabinets of planning departments”. Of course, it matters little that there is zero evidence that the planning system is actually stifling supply – the ideology demands that planning regulation must remain firmly in the crosshairs. As planning academic Michael Gunder puts it – “planning is the chief remaining scapegoat of neoliberal governance”, a convenient patsy for contemporary political failures. Housing and planning Minister Eoghan Murphy’s latest wheeze in this anti-planning crusade is a draft diktat to all planning authorities to overrule, what he sees as the overly restrictive maximum building height caps in our towns and cities. Ostensibly justified on grounds of sustainable densification, a presumption in favour of increased buildings heights will now become a mandatory policy requirement in all urban development plans. It is hard to fathom how high-rise development, an entirely niche issue in the context of a very serious housing crisis, has come to dominate public discourse about city planning. Certainly, it has become a lighting-rod for those who see planning regulation as the chief villain and bugbear in impeding housing supply, and development more generally. Influential commentators throughout the mediascape, cheered on by business lobbies and rightwing YIMBY Twitterati, fulminate that we must go “Up!Up!Up!”. Quizzical voices, on the other hand, are traduced as anti-progress, NIMBY, luddites for having the temerity to condemn an entire generation to overpriced homes and endless commutes. It has, of course, long been documented that, contrary to common myth, a simplistic correlation between highrise and high-density is entirely misguided. It goes without saying that some of the tallest cities in the world are also, characteristically, the most sprawling. Indeed, Minister Murphy’s own cost modelling, published just last April, identifies building heights of up to six storeys as being optimal from a viability, density and affordability perspective. Above six storeys, building costs spiral exponentially, due to increased fire safety and other structural requirements. This is entirely counterproductive when the delivery of affordable homes for the estimated 100,000 people who languish on housing lists and the 10,000 homeless is the objective. A mid-rise urban form of six to eight storeys also accords with all international best-practice principles for the creation of high-density, high-quality, transit-oriented, ‘liveable’ and equitable urban spaces, as in oft-cited archetypes Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Barcelona. Indeed it also conforms with long-standing Irish planning guidelines and policies, such as the sustainable urban development guidelines introduced by Government in 2009. Dublin City Council has been debating this issue for nigh on two decades now, which has culminated in a general consensus for a building-height cap of eight storeys with some select locations designated as potentially suitable for higher rise development. So given that this debate has long been settled and the widespread acknowledgement that high-rise towers would make no meaningful contribution whatsoever to general housing affordability or urban density, why then is there a need for this latest edict from the Minister? Why does such an inconsequential fringe issue merit such an intervention and continue to enjoy such a prominent position in public debate? Cui bono? The answer, of course, lies in the hidden rationalities of a resurgent deregulatory ‘let the market rip’ urban growth machine politics and a planning system incessantly targeted by short-term profit-seeking masquerading as a supposed green shift to smart, sustainable urbanism. True to form, where its interests dictate, propertied power implicitly sets the terms of public discourse. Professor Brendan Gleeson of the University of Melbourne describes this global phenomenon as “vertical sprawl” driven by coalitions of property developers, agents and other rentiers seeking to maximise their yields from high-value land. Barely ten years after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, where poor planning regulation was rightly fingered as a key contributor to financial ruin, we are again witnessing the creeping recrudescence of a discredited deregulatory ideology. It is little wonder that, following his umpteenth failure to secure planning permission for a high-rise tower in Dublin city centre, charlatan urbanist, Johnny Ronan, has publicly stated his intention to try once again. No doubt his dogged perseverance will one day pay off. Of course, it was Ireland’s original rightist ideologues, the Progressive Democrats, who were the progenitors for proposals to Manhattanise Dublin city centre with their ‘A New Heart for the City’ proposal for a gleaming, gentrified enclave of chrome and glass skyscrapers in the docklands, first mooted back in 2006 just before the economic implosion. Indeed, it was Ronan’s, now bankrupt, Treasury Holdings which was to the fore in ceaseless boom-time efforts (which haven’t gone away, you know) to relocate Dublin Port in order to clone a new sterile high-rise downtown. Throughout the western world, these phallic citadels of global financial capitalism exclusively target the corporate elite and the Frappuccinosipping affluent, creative classes. It is with no hint of irony that all the recent exemplars of tall buildings triumphantly depicted in Minister Murphy’s proposed guidelines as architectural prototypes, such as the loftily christened ‘Millennium Tower, ‘Elysium’, and ‘Capital Dock’, exclusively provide for upmarket corporate offices, hotels and highend condos. As DIT housing lecturer Lorcan Sirr coins it: “High rise is for high rollers”. This in the midst of an ongoing social housing calamity. That is why this debate really matters. The real rationality behind persistent clamours to lift building height restrictions lies not in specious claims of a supposedly green shift to intensified, highdensity compact urban forms or easing housing supply bottlenecks, but is synoptic of the battle for the type of cities we wish to create. Deliberately obfuscating high-rise with high density is a clever ruse which belies the deregulatory marketdriven ideology that underpins it, and serves only as an object to co-opt and deflect critique. What the