Jist of it is that the Architect interviewed states that there’s no shortage of houses granted PP that are not the subject of appeals or judicial reviews.
He says that certain examples of developments like St. Annes Park are held up as representative of a dominant NIMBY attitude, but these are a very small minority of cases and that there are tens of thousands of sites with full PP “gathering dust”.
One snippet from the article:
Strategic Housing Developments
Opposition to housing developments is being painted as a new problem by developers and the government, but these sort of objections and appeals to councils and An Bord Pleanála have been around for a long time. It’s true that legal challenges have become a more common tool used to oppose housing, with more than 23,000 homes impacted by legal challenges in four years. **But equally, almost 70,000 homes in large-scale housing developments are unaffected by legal issues – and not even a third are being built.**
So, why are these sorts of objections being put forward as a problem now? A research paper by Mick Lennon and Richard Waldron, two academics from UCD and Queen’s University, gives us a bit of insight. As part of a 2019 paper, they interviewed housing developers, politicians and civil servants. They presented an account of the lobbying of Simon Coveney, then housing minister, in 2015 which prompted the government to introduce a string of developer-friendly rules.
The government created the Strategic Housing Development (SHD) scheme, which allowed developers building housing schemes of 100 units or more to apply straight to An Bord Pleanála – circumventing the local authority and so-called Nimby residents. To achieve this fast-track system, Lennon and Waldron said that developers and lobbyists put forward a narrative that Ireland’s third-party appeals process was the source of “significant delays and uncertainty” in the planning system.
In their research, one developer asks “Why does Joe Public have the same right as the developer every time”, while another says, “A lot of times you think well; is it democracy gone a bit too far?” One developer told them that “this democratic structure in our cities doesn’t work” and added that Ireland should move to a “more corporate (model)”.
Lennon and Waldron’s paper says the democratic nature of the Irish planning system was “rendered problematic” due to the perception of the effectiveness of objections. The conclusion, one developer told them, was that there’s ”too much democracy“ in the planning process.
Following its success in getting Coveney to sign off on a new fast-track system to rubber stamp large housing projects, a member of Property Industry Ireland, a planning consultant, boasted about the success of the lobbying campaign aimed at the minister to Lennon and Waldron.
“The fast-track planning system, the 100 unit-plus thing, was a thing that [PII colleague] and I had discussed. And [PII colleague] went on the Marian Finucane programme and discussed it. **And Simon Coveney . . . heard it on the Marian Finucane programme, rang him up, wanted to meet us. We went in and met him. And we met him four times over about six or seven weeks for, amazing actually, from eight o’clock at night until midnight. And he went through what his vision was for the Irish planning property system. And we gave him our recommendations and they took it lock, stock and barrel and stuck it into the new housing bill,” one PII member told Lennon and Waldron.**
When asked about the comments made in the research paper, a spokesman for the Department of Housing said it does not comment on “selective opinion and quotes” attributed to “anonymous sources”.
That fast-track scheme included a method to circumvent the development plans devised by local councils and councillors – another grouping seen as Nimby-adjacent by developers. Developers could now use a “material contravention” mechanism to avoid details such as building height limits included in local authority development plans. Interestingly enough, these contraventions of development plans have been at the centre of many legal cases taken by so-called Nimbys.
Last year, An Bord Pleanála was asked why it lost so many court cases taken by so-called Nimbys. It told an Oireachtas committee that the most common reason why a housing project was quashed in the High Court was legal issues concerning the “material contravention of the development plans”.
**Developers wished for a fast-tracked system and got it. Now, that exact system they devised and boasted about creating in 2015 is what has empowered a string of so-called Nimbys to take, and win, legal cases**
Government scapegoats. They think they can turn us on eachother, in the hope that we will ignore their ineptitude. If they are a problem, the government could solve that problem. The common denominator is the government.
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Can’t read the article, but this appears to be a Newstalk section discussing it.
https://link.goloudplayer.com/s/pGjHnPEizbEd
Jist of it is that the Architect interviewed states that there’s no shortage of houses granted PP that are not the subject of appeals or judicial reviews.
He says that certain examples of developments like St. Annes Park are held up as representative of a dominant NIMBY attitude, but these are a very small minority of cases and that there are tens of thousands of sites with full PP “gathering dust”.
One snippet from the article:
Strategic Housing Developments
Opposition to housing developments is being painted as a new problem by developers and the government, but these sort of objections and appeals to councils and An Bord Pleanála have been around for a long time. It’s true that legal challenges have become a more common tool used to oppose housing, with more than 23,000 homes impacted by legal challenges in four years. **But equally, almost 70,000 homes in large-scale housing developments are unaffected by legal issues – and not even a third are being built.**
So, why are these sorts of objections being put forward as a problem now? A research paper by Mick Lennon and Richard Waldron, two academics from UCD and Queen’s University, gives us a bit of insight. As part of a 2019 paper, they interviewed housing developers, politicians and civil servants. They presented an account of the lobbying of Simon Coveney, then housing minister, in 2015 which prompted the government to introduce a string of developer-friendly rules.
The government created the Strategic Housing Development (SHD) scheme, which allowed developers building housing schemes of 100 units or more to apply straight to An Bord Pleanála – circumventing the local authority and so-called Nimby residents. To achieve this fast-track system, Lennon and Waldron said that developers and lobbyists put forward a narrative that Ireland’s third-party appeals process was the source of “significant delays and uncertainty” in the planning system.
In their research, one developer asks “Why does Joe Public have the same right as the developer every time”, while another says, “A lot of times you think well; is it democracy gone a bit too far?” One developer told them that “this democratic structure in our cities doesn’t work” and added that Ireland should move to a “more corporate (model)”.
Lennon and Waldron’s paper says the democratic nature of the Irish planning system was “rendered problematic” due to the perception of the effectiveness of objections. The conclusion, one developer told them, was that there’s ”too much democracy“ in the planning process.
Following its success in getting Coveney to sign off on a new fast-track system to rubber stamp large housing projects, a member of Property Industry Ireland, a planning consultant, boasted about the success of the lobbying campaign aimed at the minister to Lennon and Waldron.
“The fast-track planning system, the 100 unit-plus thing, was a thing that [PII colleague] and I had discussed. And [PII colleague] went on the Marian Finucane programme and discussed it. **And Simon Coveney . . . heard it on the Marian Finucane programme, rang him up, wanted to meet us. We went in and met him. And we met him four times over about six or seven weeks for, amazing actually, from eight o’clock at night until midnight. And he went through what his vision was for the Irish planning property system. And we gave him our recommendations and they took it lock, stock and barrel and stuck it into the new housing bill,” one PII member told Lennon and Waldron.**
When asked about the comments made in the research paper, a spokesman for the Department of Housing said it does not comment on “selective opinion and quotes” attributed to “anonymous sources”.
That fast-track scheme included a method to circumvent the development plans devised by local councils and councillors – another grouping seen as Nimby-adjacent by developers. Developers could now use a “material contravention” mechanism to avoid details such as building height limits included in local authority development plans. Interestingly enough, these contraventions of development plans have been at the centre of many legal cases taken by so-called Nimbys.
Last year, An Bord Pleanála was asked why it lost so many court cases taken by so-called Nimbys. It told an Oireachtas committee that the most common reason why a housing project was quashed in the High Court was legal issues concerning the “material contravention of the development plans”.
**Developers wished for a fast-tracked system and got it. Now, that exact system they devised and boasted about creating in 2015 is what has empowered a string of so-called Nimbys to take, and win, legal cases**
Government scapegoats. They think they can turn us on eachother, in the hope that we will ignore their ineptitude. If they are a problem, the government could solve that problem. The common denominator is the government.