Are planning laws just a tool for the government to bootstrap the economy?

Ubbquittious

Back in the day when the first planning laws came out to prevent the country becoming one massive ramshackle building their intentions were very noble and all but that day is long gone. Since the recession ended the government has tightened up the artificial scarcity of houses massively and which is one of the main reasons we now have a homeless crisis.



We have a couple odd million people working in this country and most of them will want a house, most of what they spend their money on over the course of their life is housing. Your average worker bringing home 30 odd k a year will spend a few 100k over his life on rent/mortgage/interest which is a great money spinner for the economy. In order for this to work house prices have to be almost out of reach for the average fella and completely out of reach for the low earners in order to keep the rental market money spinner going.


The Greens/FF government ensured that through new stricter A-rated planning rules and making building sites less available that house prices would go up massively. This way they can extract as much money as possible from the average worker for what is essentially a brick box. There is no reason this brick box needs to have a minimum price of about 250k as is the case these days. If a large field outside of Dublin was filled with prefabricated houses from Scandinavia house prices would drop massively.


Through health and safety regulations, laws mandating you use qualified professionals for the construction and mandatory air source heat pumps the Government also ensures the cost of construction remains artificially high.

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We are all being codded massively by this system. Go back 80 or so years and this concept of saving up for ages for a deposit so you can pay loads of bank interest was foreign to most. If you wanted a house you bought a scrap of land for feck all or got one from your family and you gathered a load of bricks, thatched it and you were done with it.

Yurt2

In Japan, it used to be the case that you can build more or less whatever you wanted to whatever height you pleased as long as the building conformed to earthquake and safety codes. It's why you get so many fugly buildings or genius architecture there. It's pretty much the most counter-NIMBY nation there is. It's slightly tighter I understand these days, but they still have extremely liberal planning laws compared to Ireland.

Harry Palmr

So build any old crap anywhere is your policy is it?

Heat pumps and well insulated homes are necessary for the national future fuel bill/carbon levy. Bungalow blitz is not something to return to.

dxhound2005

There have been many iterations of planning and development law over the decades. This one from 1934 does not suggest that things were any less bureaucratic "back in the day".

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1934/act/22/enacted/en/html

Yurt2

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Eric Cartman

Local needs planning and design guides for one off housing should be considered a human rights violation.

Yurt2

Was in Japan recently and was shown around Tokyo by a Japanese aquaintance. I was asking about some of the mad looking buildings around the city, and he said that from when the war ended until relatively recently, it was pretty much anything goes. There were obviously rules about where hospitals and schools should go, but once a plot was zoned for development, you could build an 80m tall mickey shaped building and the city wouldn't say boo. The building only needed to conform to safety and earthquake standards. He did however say it has slightly tightened up over the last couple of decades.

Idbatterim

they should reduce the tax take, they receive on new houses. They should be very well insulated, but they should reduce the rates charged

Eric Cartman

Insulation requirements should be kept, soundproofing requirements for apartments should be mandatory and to a much higher level than now, you shouldnt be able to build an apartment where your neighbours can hear your toilet flush, water pump run or walking round on wooden floors.

But if you want to throw a 3 storey 5000sq ft home on your own acre that should be none of the governments business

Idbatterim

the planning laws here are kept at they are on purpose, to suit vested interests! log cabins should be permitted, very sustainable from an environmental persepective, very quick to put up (massively addressing the skilled labour shortage) they reason they arent allowed, is so that people have to take out , several hundred thousand euro mortgages and compete with each other, driving prices up and enforcing scarcity. Which obviously benefits all decision makers here (home owners and doubly so if they are landlords)

sound proofing in apartments as cartman mentions is a huge one! I will never live in an apartment here again, given the noise related issues. They are hall bent on dual aspect, which increases build cost substantially, but couldnt give a toss about noise! Give people the option of a cental, modern, well insulated (noise and heat wise) apartment, even if its single aspect and a bit smaller than current guidelines (to start making it affordable to the masses) and they would take your hand off, versus sharing with people in kips etc

I would also get rid of stamp duty too, with possible clauses

fly_agaric

Yurt! wrote: »

The building only needed to conform to safety and earthquake standards. He did however say it has slightly tightened up over the last couple of decades.

That is interesting but I'd imagine it is a big enough "only".
Speaking again from ignorance, would also expect the Japanese would be pretty rigorous about enforcing the letter of that on developers/builders vs our lax attitude (to enforcement) here.

Yurt2

fly_agaric wrote: »

That is interesting but I'd imagine it is a big enough "only".
Speaking again from ignorance, would also expect the Japanese would be pretty rigorous about enforcing the letter of that on developers/builders vs our lax attitude (to enforcement) here.

One thing's for sure, they didn't go from having all their major cities practically flattened in the '40s, to where they are today by having planning and development regs that pander to whatever the Japanese equivalent of An Taisce is.

jimmycrackcorm

Japan is a wierd example. Houses devalue to being worthless there.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution