# Housing Summit hosted by The Housing Agency



## Brendan Burgess (24 Jun 2014)

The Housing Agency held a Housing Summit on Friday 20th June.  It was an ideas generating session as distinct from a series of presentations. We were split into 12 groups of 10 people, so the issues I took away from it, might be very different from what someone else took away. There was only one short open forum towards the end.

A lot of problems were identified, but I am not sure if a lot of solutions were. 

*The need for housing is very different from the demand for housing 

*Housing Agency figures: 



|properties|population 
Single person|25%|8%
two person|31%
3 person|18%
4 person|15%
5 +|11%The suggestion seemed to be that we "need" lots of one bedroom apartments. 

However, those involved in the industry pointed out that there is almost no demand for one bedroom apartments. Even if someone is living on their own, they want to live in a house with a front and back garden. 

I got the impression, that the planning authorities in the Dublin area want to see a lot of one bed apartments built, but developers don't want to build them. 

This is a big dilemma for the planners. An intensification of one bed apartments would be good for society as a whole, but if we single people insist on living in three bedroom houses, nothing is going to get built. 

A ptsb spokesperson said that their lending criteria for apartments in urban areas are no different from their criteria for houses.  

*"There is zoning for 200,000 housing units" 
*A lot of different figures were thrown out, which seemed to suggest that there were plenty of ready to go sites with planning permission.  

But they are not for the right housing units in the right places. 

*Developers find it very hard to get finance for apartments 
*Say a builder has planning permission for 100 houses. They get finance for 25 houses, build those, sell them, and move onto Stage 2. 

With apartments, they have to build them all together and so need a huge amount of finance. 

*It costs €40k per underground parking space 
*Dublin City Council insists that there must be an underground parking space for every apartment,  although, people renting apartments in the city centre, don't want parking spaces. 

This is a big dilemma for the planners. If they don't have parking spaces, the residents will park on the road. 

*A developer of a one bed apartment in Dublin would need €1,900 rent a month to justify building it
*A developer who builds apartments to rent, says that he needs €1,900 per month to justify building a one bed apartment which would give him a 7%(?) return on his investment.  The equivalent figure for a 2 bed apartment is €2,500 

*According to regulations, every house must be a Rolls Royce 
*One speaker made a very good point, that the regulations were such that every house must be built to Rolls Royce standards - solar panels, disabled access; etc.  But more people drive Daihatsus than Rolls Royces.  But they had to pay for Rolls Royces. 

*Social housing 
*I raised the issue that Part V requirements for Social Housing was one of a number of issues which pushed up the cost of building new houses, and as such, made building more expensive and less profitable to build. 

Bizarrely, an employee of the Department of the Environment insisted that these requirements were good for developers as the local authority bought the houses from the developers.   I asked, why, if the developers thought it was such a good idea, they paid money to buy out their obligations under Part V. 

I think what might have caused the fuzzy thinking here, is that when house prices dropped, the fixed prices agreed in advance by the local authorities were a great help to builders. But not anymore. 

It was pointed out by the housing association people, that builders don't like Part V, because they don't want a mix of social housing and private housing in the same development. 

*There is a €15k per unit Luas levy for new houses
*Anyone building along the Luas line has to pay a Luas levy of €15k (?) as well as a development levy of €11k.(?) adding €26k to the developer's cost.

*Selling off the plans 
*We looked at some ways of integrating development finance with mortgage finance.  Could the mortgage lender lend the money to the borrower to pay stage payments as the house is being built?  

Solicitors were against this, as the buyer had little protection is the builder went bust. 

I asked if the site could be sold separately to the buyer followed by a building contract. At least then, if the builder went bust, the buyer would own the site and the half built house.  This would give rise to two problems. Firstly, the developer would be taxed at 25% on profits arising from  the sale of the site, while he is taxed at 12.5%, if the whole package is done together.  Secondly, the lenders might be slow to lend for building on a site not owned by the developer.  

I wondered if there might be one lender to the developer and the buyer.  Say I commit to buying a house in two years and have mortgage approval from AIB. If I lose my job in the meantime, AIB will withdraw my approval. But say that AIB were financing the developer as well.  AIB would give me a binding approval, so while I become more risky after losing my job, at least their developer client gets paid.


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

Brendan Burgess said:


> Even if someone is living on their own, they want to live in a house with a front and back garden.
> 
> 
> *It costs €40k per underground parking space *
> ...


 
While it might be true to state that a single person would prefer a 3 bed house with garden, they cannot afford this. Did anyone have figures for the demography of people looking for accommodation. Is it one person households or is it families. I understood the current problem is families. 

Did anyone discuss the fact that apartments suitable for families were not built and is their not a market for this. In any other capital city in Europe they exist, do they exist in Dublin. 

Where is the figures that show that single people in Dublin city do not want car parking spaces, if there is one thing Dublin needs it is more parking, preferable underground and preferable under the building they live in. 

Even if this were true, there is a shortgage of spaces, so if there are spare spaces, then they can be rented to people working in the offices. As happens in London, Paris etc. 

Not sure about the people at this meeting, but I've visited a lot of housing estates and the one thing that never fails to amaze me is the fact that everybody is fighting about the car parking spaces. Here on AAM it's a problem issue at least twice a month.

*Roll's Royce housing.*

This made me laugh. Please ask that person to point out the roll's royce housing, and I'll bring him to badly constructed, paper thin walls, neighbours hating each other because of no sound barriers, lack of parking, shoddy plumbing. But they have handicapped doors to get to the toilet. And now we are to believe solar panals are a luxury, when they cannot even get the basics right. 

I visited a new housing estate recently, 100K for 3 bed semi d's. Shocking is all I can say. You could get a wheel chair in the front door, and it would pass too into the toilet, but you couldn't get from the front door to the toilet door. As for the layout of the bedrooms, you couldn't put the double bed where it ought to go etc etc. And that's the rolls royce of the town I visited. There are 5 year old houses available for less than 70K. Another part of the country you can get the same thing for 50K.


----------



## Brendan Burgess (24 Jun 2014)

Bronte said:


> Sherry Fitzgerald have done some report to show that 3 bed houses are in demand.  Not sure if the report is online. This was backed up by myhome.ie and by the developers present


 


> Did anyone discuss the fact that apartments suitable for families were not built and is their not a market for this. In any other capital city in Europe they exist, do they exist in Dublin.


No a good point. I will raise that with one of the developers and get his take on it.



> Where is the figures that show that single people in Dublin city do not want car parking spaces, if there is one thing Dublin needs it is more parking, preferable underground and preferable under the building they live in.



I was very surprised by this. This is from a company who builds apartments to let.  His tenants don't want car parking spaces.


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

Brendan Burgess said:


> . This is from a company who builds apartments to let. His tenants don't want car parking spaces.


 
Well can he not sell them on to someone else if the tenant doesn't want it. Or the tenant can have it with his apartment and use it for storage, or rent it out to someone and make a few bob.

I wonder what is the percentage of people without cars in Dublin.


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

Were experienced Dublin landlords at this meeting?  Was the PRTB and threashold?  St. Vincent de Paul?

Who actually was at it?


----------



## RainyDay (24 Jun 2014)

THanks for the update, Brendan. Are you missing some data from the first table in your post?

I agree with Bronte's comments about Rolls Royces. If you want to understand the daily experience of some people with disabilities living in rental housing, have a look at this short article with video clips;

https://www.storehouse.co/stories/146m-when-a-house-is-not-a-home


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

RainyDay said:


> If you want to understand the daily experience of some people with disabilities living in rental housing, have a look at this short article with video clips;


 
I forgot to mention in the house I viewed, a handicapped person could not get up the stairs, you know those narrow vertical stairs that are the current fad.  And the downstairs layout meant there could be no bedroom there.  

I do not understand the requirments for doors to be wheelchair friendly but not the getting around the house.  Where is the logical.  Wouldn't it be better to make a percentage of houses wheelchair friendly.


----------



## Brendan Burgess (24 Jun 2014)

RainyDay said:


> THanks for the update, Brendan. Are you missing some data from the first table in your post?
> 
> https://www.storehouse.co/stories/146m-when-a-house-is-not-a-home



Yes, but I didn't take it down.


----------



## Brendan Burgess (24 Jun 2014)

Bronte said:


> Were experienced Dublin landlords at this meeting?  Was the PRTB and threashold?  St. Vincent de Paul?
> 
> Who actually was at it?



Loads of organisations 
PRTB 
Threshold, Cluid Housing, Dublin Regional Homeless Executive 
NAMA
Irishlandlord.com , various estate agencies, , Kennedy Wilson , Property Industry Ireland


----------



## RainyDay (24 Jun 2014)

Bronte said:


> I forgot to mention in the house I viewed, a handicapped person could not get up the stairs, you know those narrow vertical stairs that are the current fad.  And the downstairs layout meant there could be no bedroom there.



I haven't seen them those kind of stairs, but the requirements for 900mm wide stairs only apply when there is no habitable room at ground level. The objective of the current regs is to make the house visitable for everybody, rather than liveable by anybody.


Bronte said:


> I do not understand the requirments for doors to be wheelchair friendly but not the getting around the house.  Where is the logical.  Wouldn't it be better to make a percentage of houses wheelchair friendly.



There is no exclusion for 'getting round the house'. From http://www.environ.ie/en/Publicatio...g/BuildingStandards/FileDownLoad,24773,en.pdf



> 3.3.2.1 Horizontal circulation within a  dwelling
> Corridors, passageways and doors to habitable rooms in the entrance storey or,  where there is no habitable room at this  level, in the storey containing the main living room, should be sufficiently wide and free of stepped changes of level so  as to allow convenient circulation.



PS Lots of people don't like 'handicapped' terminology for a whole range of reasons.


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

Brendan Burgess said:


> Loads of organisations
> PRTB
> Threshold, Cluid Housing, Dublin Regional Homeless Executive
> NAMA
> Irishlandlord.com , various estate agencies, , Kennedy Wilson , Property Industry Ireland


 
But no actual landlords ?  No idea who Kennedy Wilson is or Property Industry Ireland, and I believe Irish landlrod.com is a website rather than an organisation. 

Were there any actual tenants?  

There sure are a lot of agencies/groupings involved in this, and presumably no joined up thinking.


----------



## Bronte (24 Jun 2014)

RainyDay said:


> I haven't seen them those kind of stairs, but the requirements for 900mm wide stairs only apply when there is no habitable room at ground level. The objective of the current regs is to make the house visitable for everybody, rather than liveable by anybody.
> 
> 
> There is no exclusion for 'getting round the house'. From http://www.environ.ie/en/Publicatio...g/BuildingStandards/FileDownLoad,24773,en.pdf
> ...


 

Sorry, is the correct term, people with disabilities, I'll have to remember that if it is.  I find it hard to keep up with what is PC sometimes.  

Yes there are plenty of regulations, but enforcement of regulation is a different thing.  The houses I saw, someone in a wheelchair would not be able to go from one room to the other via the corridor.

The stairs I mention are the trend in the last 15 years, exceedingly narrow, and often with a sharp bend at the top.  It's why they build all the new double beds with a split base (that was my understanding - as Irish people don't bring in their furniture via the upstairs window etc).

As the houses got narrower, to fit in more house on less space, they narrowed every room, and the stairs too.  

As anyone/everyone knows, regulation means nothing.  I haven't been inspected once in over 20 years for compliance with regulations, tenants, nothing.


----------



## RainyDay (24 Jun 2014)

Ah come on, the 'handicap' thing isn't about new-fangled 'PC', it's just about a bit of personal respect. I recall being corrected on this back in the late 80s. 

You're right about a lack of enforcement, but the builders can't have it both ways. They can't complain about the excessive costs of regulation if they are ignoring most of the regulations anyway.


----------



## Brendan Burgess (24 Jun 2014)

RainyDay said:


> You're right about a lack of enforcement, but the builders can't have it both ways. They can't complain about the excessive costs of regulation if they are ignoring most of the regulations anyway.



But that is the problem. The good ones who comply with all the regulations end up being uncompetitive.


----------

