Ireland has enough bedrooms to solve the housing crisis “three times over,” according to Cairn Homes boss Michael Stanley. At the launch of the home builder’s latest annual results, he conducted a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Assuming there are 2.1 million housing units in the State (mainly three and four-bed homes) that means there are roughly 6.7 million bedrooms for a population of 5.3 million, he said.
Further enhancing the room-to-person ratio is the fact that roughly a million of us are couples, sharing a bedroom, Stanley said.
Hence the conclusion “we have enough bedrooms to solve our housing crisis three times over”. He claims the country is full of half-empty three and four-bed homes. “What does that tell us about our housing stock? It’s underutilised,” he said.
This was of course Stanley’s preamble to his central contention: we need smaller housing units, in other words “more apartments”.
But Ireland, he claims, has an irrational fear of apartments. Stanley, who cofounded Cairn and was appointed chief executive prior to the company’s initial public listing in 2015, said he cringes when he hears the narrative about Irish people not wanting to live in apartments. “I hear it on radio shows, in newspaper articles . . . it’s the greatest piece of misinformation that’s put out there.”
If it’s correct why did 2,300 people apply for 46 apartments at Google’s recently redeveloped Bolands Mills quarter in Dublin 4, he said.
The units, which went on the market last week, are being leased by housing agency Clúid at “discounted” rents of €1,710 a month for the two-bed units; €1,850 for the three-bed units; and €2,100 for the sole four-bed unit. According to property website Daft, these rents are 27 and 36 per cent below the current market averages for Dublin 4.
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Stanley likes these sorts of polemics. The country’s appetite (or not) for apartments is his current bugbear. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that apartments have become the company’s main product. Apartments comprised 60 per cent of Cairn’s sales last year. The company’s bestselling product and highest-growth area were duplexes.
Apartments will also form the bulk of Cairn’s high-profile redevelopment of the former RTÉ lands at Donnybrook in Dublin 4. Last year An Bord Pleanála granted a 10-year planning permission to Cairn Homes Montrose Limited for a €345 million, 608-unit apartment scheme on the site.
For many, apartments (or the lack of them) are at the crux of our housing problem. We missed out on the great big urban apartment builds that cities like Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna are famous for. We built out instead of up. Dublin is a monument to low-rise urban sprawl with aggravating implications for transport and other infrastructure.
According to Eurostat, Ireland had the highest rate of people living in houses (89.7 per cent) versus those living in apartments (10.2 per cent) in the EU in 2022. The EU average was 51.9 per cent versus 47.5 per cent. Dublin City Council, however, maintains that about 35 per cent of the units in its area – as of 2016 – were apartments and that this was comparable with Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
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The Eurostat figures are nonetheless stark and reflect a historical aversion to apartments that we haven’t quite turned around. It stems, in part at least, from the State’s conservative Catholic heritage which equated high-density housing with low moral values and saw in the big European apartment networks a potential for social unrest.
Apartments were the main reason why our home completions hit a post-crash high of 33,000 in 2023 (they were the main driver, accounting for over a third of the total). They were also the primary reason why completions dropped off last year and why Taoiseach Micheál Martin is now considering loosening the State’s system of rent controls to entice institutional investors, the main financiers of apartment schemes, back into the country.
More than any other housing unit, apartments also illustrate the extraordinarily high cost of construction here. On a square metre basis, Dublin was found to be the second most expensive city in Europe to build apartments, eclipsed only by Zurich in Switzerland, according to a recent report by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI).
In a separate report from 2021, the SCSI estimated the cost of delivering a two-bed apartment in Dublin at €359,000 for a low-rise unit in the suburbs rising to €619,000 for a high-rise unit in the city centre. Costs have gone up since then.
The lack of smaller housing units makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people to downsize hence we have a very low-level of churn in the second-hand property market and high room-to-person ratio in the midst of an acute housing shortage.
Apartment schemes, more than any other, also seem to get sandbagged in the State’s troublesome planning system.
Planning applications for apartments are three times more likely to fail than planning applications for houses. “I’d suggest that the people already lucky enough to own a home in our country are quite happy to object to apartments,” Stanley said.
He insists he’s not saying the sole answer to our housing woes is to build more apartments just that it’s a significant piece of the pie.
