Return to Commuterland...
Ghost estates, negative equity and soul-sapping commutes are the legacy of our planning-free property bubble. Cleaning up the zoning mess won't be easy...
THE MANTRA of the boom years might well have been “Build it and they will come.” And for 10 years or more it worked. But the frenzy of construction was bound to come to an end, leaving Ireland littered with incongruous developments – as well as tens of thousands of vacant houses in ghost estates.
In 2003, when we first took a long look at the commuter counties, it was evident that much of this unplanned growth had been fuelled by Dubliners fleeing exorbitant property prices. Getting their hands on relatively affordable houses, even in places they had barely heard of, seemed worth the commute.
The trend of Dublin leapfrogging into Leinster and even, with Cavan and Monaghan, into Ulster ran counter to all planning policies, but this was simply ignored. The complacent view at the time was that the growth of Commuterland would tail off when the houses “out there” lost their value, which they now have.
It was in many ways a plan-free zone. Sure, there were plans aplenty – at local, county, regional and national level. But none of them really meant anything, as council after council indulged in an orgy of rezoning so that landowners could cash in on development values and every county in Leinster and beyond could grab a share of Dublin’s growth.
Local area plans intended to provide orderly frameworks for development were often subverted by councillors and used as vehicles to satisfy the greed of farmers, speculators and developers. And regional planning guidelines that were meant to take a broader view turned out to be paper tigers that could safely be ignored locally.
In 2002 the independent Kildare councillor Tony McEvoy and Michael Smith, then chairman of An Taisce, sought a judicial review of the Meath county plan. The High Court upheld it despite evidence that it didn’t comply with the Greater Dublin strategic planning guidelines and that rezoning decisions were influenced by lobbying from landowners. This ruling by Mr Justice John Quirke exposed the guidelines as meaningless: all the councillors needed to do was to “have regard to” them, which could involve merely giving the document a sideways glance. There was no legal requirement on councillors in Meath, or anywhere else, to comply with regional planning guidelines.
The High Court decision opened the floodgates, with councillors rezoning land to beat the band – more often than not against all planning advice. Field after field on the edge of a town or village was turned into gold, and not a finger was lifted by successive ministers for the environment until Dick Roche quashed the Laois county plan in 2006.
Four years earlier Martin Cullen had declined to use the 2000 Planning Act to rein in councillors in Gorey after they zoned enough land for development to cater for up to 10 times its population.
Asked by The Irish Times in 2003 if this was not in complete defiance of public policy, Cullen said: “Yes it is, in the very narrow purist sense. But it’s not in the context of catering for what has happened in Ireland in the last few years. This massive bubble of young people came through, and where the hell were we going to put them?”
They were “making choices” to live “down the country a bit” and commute to Dublin. “The gamble is that as we develop further on, this will change.”
Of course, it didn’t change. A whole new Commuterland opened up, in some cases encouraged by tax incentives; much of the housing explosion in Longford, for example, happened because the whole county was covered by former finance minister Charlie McCreevy’s misguided Upper Shannon Rural Renewal Scheme.
“The real villain was McCreevy’s decision to go with it, giving strong incentives for investors,” one senior planner said. “All the damage is the result of that. An interdepartmental group was put together to look at the impacts of the scheme, just two years after it was introduced in 1999, and recommended that it should be stopped.”
Its unforeseen consequences were noted by Carl O’Brien of The Irish Times in December 2008 when he visited Battery Court, “Longford’s most prestigious address”, and found about half of the 100 or so houses built and work on the rest abandoned. With no signs of life, it was “eerily quiet, almost like a post-apocalyptic scene from a science-fiction movie”.
There are scenes like this almost everywhere now, as property prices collapse – particularly in Commuterland – and developers go bust, with their unsustainable bank loans going into Nama. Empty houses, shops, retail parks and shopping centres are all grim evidence of how the boom was so grotesquely mismanaged. Few brakes were applied. In some cases the Department of the Environment withheld funding for water and sewerage schemes where land was zoned against planning advice. In others An Bord Pleanála simply refused planning permission where the zoning went against sustainable development.
But these were exceptions in a rip-roaring era that left us with thousands of hectares of zoned land that’s not developed. In Commuterland Laois is tops, with 1,678 hectares, followed by Meath (1,652), Wexford (1,382), Cavan (1,161), Kildare (1,147), Offaly (1,044), Westmeath (977), Louth (948), Longford (910), Wicklow (714) and Carlow (408). “Meath has six or seven times what it needs,” one planning source said. “But it’s a much deeper problem in the BMW [Border, Midlands and West] region, particularly in Longford, Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo.”
The Department of the Environment is surveying every county, trying to “profile the status” of unfinished estates in terms of the number of houses completed, still vacant or at various stages of construction before the builders walked away. Based on this, the department will formulate a policy response. It is also planning a manual for local authorities on how to deal with unfinished estates.
“This relates very much to Nama, because it will be the owner of a lot of these properties,” the source said. “Its main function is to get the best value for taxpayers, but it will have to make choices. If it finds that there are 100 houses approved, of which only 20 are occupied, 40 vacant and the rest unfinished, including roads, public-safety problems arise. If Nama wants to extract a saleable asset out of that, it will have to resolve issues with the local authority and may have to abandon those parts of an estate that are no longer viable.”
A great deal of putative development land will have to be dezoned, whatever about the distress this causes to its owners and their bankers. This process has already got under way in Co Kerry, where councillors have started to unravel decisions that led to 2,529 hectares of land being zoned – enough to house six times its population. Nationally, for the foreseeable future, planning policy will seek to consolidate Dublin and other cities.
“In the Dublin area, where the ‘completed but not sold’ overhang would meet less than a year’s demand, we’ll be prioritising Adamstown and Clonburris, where the State has put in €500 million in public investment,” the source said. “We have to make sure that we corral whatever emerges from the ashes into locations like that.”
The new Planning Bill should help, given its emphasis on the need for councils to demonstrate that their development plans comply with regional planning guidelines, the National Spatial Strategy and sustainable-development principles. Given that new guidelines are due to be finalised later this year, it is seen as essential that the Planning Bill is enacted before the Dáil breaks for its long summer recess. Only then would county managers and planning officials be able to say that inappropriate zoning proposals can’t be adopted – because now they’re against the law.
Report by FRANK McDONALD - Irish Times
Ghost estates, negative equity and soul-sapping commutes are the legacy of our planning-free property bubble. Cleaning up the zoning mess won't be easy...
THE MANTRA of the boom years might well have been “Build it and they will come.” And for 10 years or more it worked. But the frenzy of construction was bound to come to an end, leaving Ireland littered with incongruous developments – as well as tens of thousands of vacant houses in ghost estates.
In 2003, when we first took a long look at the commuter counties, it was evident that much of this unplanned growth had been fuelled by Dubliners fleeing exorbitant property prices. Getting their hands on relatively affordable houses, even in places they had barely heard of, seemed worth the commute.
The trend of Dublin leapfrogging into Leinster and even, with Cavan and Monaghan, into Ulster ran counter to all planning policies, but this was simply ignored. The complacent view at the time was that the growth of Commuterland would tail off when the houses “out there” lost their value, which they now have.
It was in many ways a plan-free zone. Sure, there were plans aplenty – at local, county, regional and national level. But none of them really meant anything, as council after council indulged in an orgy of rezoning so that landowners could cash in on development values and every county in Leinster and beyond could grab a share of Dublin’s growth.
Local area plans intended to provide orderly frameworks for development were often subverted by councillors and used as vehicles to satisfy the greed of farmers, speculators and developers. And regional planning guidelines that were meant to take a broader view turned out to be paper tigers that could safely be ignored locally.
In 2002 the independent Kildare councillor Tony McEvoy and Michael Smith, then chairman of An Taisce, sought a judicial review of the Meath county plan. The High Court upheld it despite evidence that it didn’t comply with the Greater Dublin strategic planning guidelines and that rezoning decisions were influenced by lobbying from landowners. This ruling by Mr Justice John Quirke exposed the guidelines as meaningless: all the councillors needed to do was to “have regard to” them, which could involve merely giving the document a sideways glance. There was no legal requirement on councillors in Meath, or anywhere else, to comply with regional planning guidelines.
The High Court decision opened the floodgates, with councillors rezoning land to beat the band – more often than not against all planning advice. Field after field on the edge of a town or village was turned into gold, and not a finger was lifted by successive ministers for the environment until Dick Roche quashed the Laois county plan in 2006.
Four years earlier Martin Cullen had declined to use the 2000 Planning Act to rein in councillors in Gorey after they zoned enough land for development to cater for up to 10 times its population.
Asked by The Irish Times in 2003 if this was not in complete defiance of public policy, Cullen said: “Yes it is, in the very narrow purist sense. But it’s not in the context of catering for what has happened in Ireland in the last few years. This massive bubble of young people came through, and where the hell were we going to put them?”
They were “making choices” to live “down the country a bit” and commute to Dublin. “The gamble is that as we develop further on, this will change.”
Of course, it didn’t change. A whole new Commuterland opened up, in some cases encouraged by tax incentives; much of the housing explosion in Longford, for example, happened because the whole county was covered by former finance minister Charlie McCreevy’s misguided Upper Shannon Rural Renewal Scheme.
“The real villain was McCreevy’s decision to go with it, giving strong incentives for investors,” one senior planner said. “All the damage is the result of that. An interdepartmental group was put together to look at the impacts of the scheme, just two years after it was introduced in 1999, and recommended that it should be stopped.”
Its unforeseen consequences were noted by Carl O’Brien of The Irish Times in December 2008 when he visited Battery Court, “Longford’s most prestigious address”, and found about half of the 100 or so houses built and work on the rest abandoned. With no signs of life, it was “eerily quiet, almost like a post-apocalyptic scene from a science-fiction movie”.
There are scenes like this almost everywhere now, as property prices collapse – particularly in Commuterland – and developers go bust, with their unsustainable bank loans going into Nama. Empty houses, shops, retail parks and shopping centres are all grim evidence of how the boom was so grotesquely mismanaged. Few brakes were applied. In some cases the Department of the Environment withheld funding for water and sewerage schemes where land was zoned against planning advice. In others An Bord Pleanála simply refused planning permission where the zoning went against sustainable development.
But these were exceptions in a rip-roaring era that left us with thousands of hectares of zoned land that’s not developed. In Commuterland Laois is tops, with 1,678 hectares, followed by Meath (1,652), Wexford (1,382), Cavan (1,161), Kildare (1,147), Offaly (1,044), Westmeath (977), Louth (948), Longford (910), Wicklow (714) and Carlow (408). “Meath has six or seven times what it needs,” one planning source said. “But it’s a much deeper problem in the BMW [Border, Midlands and West] region, particularly in Longford, Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo.”
The Department of the Environment is surveying every county, trying to “profile the status” of unfinished estates in terms of the number of houses completed, still vacant or at various stages of construction before the builders walked away. Based on this, the department will formulate a policy response. It is also planning a manual for local authorities on how to deal with unfinished estates.
“This relates very much to Nama, because it will be the owner of a lot of these properties,” the source said. “Its main function is to get the best value for taxpayers, but it will have to make choices. If it finds that there are 100 houses approved, of which only 20 are occupied, 40 vacant and the rest unfinished, including roads, public-safety problems arise. If Nama wants to extract a saleable asset out of that, it will have to resolve issues with the local authority and may have to abandon those parts of an estate that are no longer viable.”
A great deal of putative development land will have to be dezoned, whatever about the distress this causes to its owners and their bankers. This process has already got under way in Co Kerry, where councillors have started to unravel decisions that led to 2,529 hectares of land being zoned – enough to house six times its population. Nationally, for the foreseeable future, planning policy will seek to consolidate Dublin and other cities.
“In the Dublin area, where the ‘completed but not sold’ overhang would meet less than a year’s demand, we’ll be prioritising Adamstown and Clonburris, where the State has put in €500 million in public investment,” the source said. “We have to make sure that we corral whatever emerges from the ashes into locations like that.”
The new Planning Bill should help, given its emphasis on the need for councils to demonstrate that their development plans comply with regional planning guidelines, the National Spatial Strategy and sustainable-development principles. Given that new guidelines are due to be finalised later this year, it is seen as essential that the Planning Bill is enacted before the Dáil breaks for its long summer recess. Only then would county managers and planning officials be able to say that inappropriate zoning proposals can’t be adopted – because now they’re against the law.
Report by FRANK McDONALD - Irish Times