Bigger Better Faster More
As much as central government was successful in “turning on the supply tap” (Ronan O’Driscoll) in the late 1990s, much of the hasty development that Ireland has seen over the past few years could have been avoided if supply had reacted earlier and in a more flexible way to rising demand. But in the early years of the boom, central government had still not realised how important it was to encourage housing development, and local councils, left alone without an independent tax base and lacking the incentives as well as the means to engage in proactive planning, did not plan for enough new houses. Then, when it was almost too late and prices had already skyrocketed, the government realised the dangers of this situation and encouraged building. But, as Ronan O’Driscoll put it, “the government only thinks in numbers and units” – thus failing to understand that good, flexible and strong supply means more than just “throwing in a few hundred two-storey, three bedrooms semis” (Liam O’Donnell). And this “thinking in numbers” was passed down from central government to local planners, who could basically declare that they had done their jobs properly if they could only show that their numbers had gone up. The quality of these developments does not appear in the statistics and is hard to quantify anyway. In addition, local planners had suddenly to deal with a vastly increased work-load, and to do so, tended to favour projects that could be processed via a kind of assemblyline production. Which is not to say that it is local planners who are wholly to blame for poor housing – they simply did what they could under the given system and political pressures. To blame, rather is the fact that central government has a predominant role in both local planning and local finance. As a direct consequence of this arrangement, planning first did not deliver enough, and when it eventually delivered, it was the wrong kind of housing. As Dr Simon Stevenson remarked, this was “central planning failing all over again”. The developers, too, have responsibility for what has been built. Their excuse is, of course, that they were 52
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operating under a system and incentives that were given to them by the political institutions, so that although one may deplore the results, the developers were only behaving rationally. And although this may be true, it is nevertheless interesting to understand their behaviour and then try to understand what conclusions can be drawn from them for the planning process. First and foremost, developers and landowners benefited from the fact that planning was not flexible enough to react to increases in demand as soon as they occurred. As we have seen, the political pressure to zone more land and enable more development only followed huge increases in house prices in the wake of the “Celtic Tiger” years. Had the planning system delivered a higher number of completions before backlog built up, this would have taken off some of the pressure on house prices. But in the event, things could not have been better for developers offering new houses in the late 1990s: huge demand combined with house prices not previously experienced and a planning process that invited them to deliver as many units as possible in a short time. The whole situation could rightly have been interpreted as an invitation to make a lot of money quickly. And that is precisely what they did.
Dublin planner Dick Gleeson: “Focus on stimulating development”
In fact, the developers did not have to bother too much to provide good quality construction work, interesting architecture, or special design features. In many cases where there were large developments, “they did not even have to