The Debate: Could industrial estates offer a solution to the housing crisis?

Lorcan Sirr: Repurposing industrial estates can work - but not if they just feature high-rise rental units

The 75-hectare Dublin Industrial Estate on Dublin’s northside between Glasnevin, Finglas and Cabra is an underutilised landbank, with now-dated industrial units. What could be better, therefore, than repurposing this site for housing, concurrently keeping as much employment as possible?

Given previous regeneration flops, however, can it be done successfully?

Submissions to the Ballyboggan Draft Local Area Plan came from the general public and others, including from landed interests such as Bartra Property, Prevalent Land (Kepak), Kempton Vale Limited and Blacklion Real Estate Fund.

There are three potential issues with the plan to redevelop the Dublin Industrial Estate.

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The first is that any rezoning of land from its current use to residential will create windfall profits for landowners as the price of the land rockets in the expectation of being sold on for more profitable development; and the higher the proposed housing density, the higher the asking price for the land.

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This will add billions to development costs and every cent of windfall profits for landowners will be paid for twice in rents or mortgages by occupiers, or in State supports by the taxpayer.

The second is that the Achilles’ heel of urban regeneration is its reliance on the property market. Market cycles of boom and bust affect private sector viability and mean large schemes take years. See Adamstown and Cherrywood.

The typology should be compact three- to four-storey own-door housing at about 100 units per hectare, which would allow for housing that is affordable, and a decent public realm

The third issue is that developers will only build what is most profitable. And in the last decade, as housing is increasingly used as an investment vehicle, nearly all city centre development has been apartments built solely to rent. With no affordable family accommodation to buy, households have increasingly fled to the commuter belt and further to live and drive everywhere. (Where are the Greens on this?)

If the plan is to keep some of the industrial employment, there will be no point in workers driving 90 minutes to work from Westmeath. That is not exactly a 15-minute city as proposed.

The danger is we will perpetuate this unsustainable pattern and end up with yet more proposals for high-rise, high-density, only-for-rent, unaffordable-for-most, token-social-housing-in-the-corner development. High-rise development is also expensive to build (ask Johnny Ronan) which would do nothing for the young households of Glasnevin, Finglas or Cabra.

[ Almost 3,000 cost-rental and social homes to be built in Dublin by housing agency Respond ]

This type of mono-tenure, rent-only, high-return development may deliver profits. But the solution to rising rents is not more supply of expensive rentals, but the reduction of demand by building housing for sale for the 400,000 existing tenants (and others) who want to buy their own home.

The typology should be compact three- to four-storey own-door housing at about 100 units per hectare, which would allow for housing that is affordable, and a decent public realm. The question is: do we want up to 7,500 affordable housing units or up to 15,000 high-rise units that will also be expensive to build, and therefore expensive to rent or buy? Vienna is Europe’s most liveable city precisely because planning asks whether any proposed development is good for children, not whether it is good for property developers.

The redevelopment of Dublin Industrial Estate has to avoid predictable hazards: windfall gains for some but additional costs for everyone else; services and infrastructure undelivered or delivered years later; density not aligning with affordability; developers being enablers rather than service-providers; no affordable housing for sale; dependence on cyclical markets; local consultations being ignored; and everybody losing the will to live during the long process.

There is another solution. The Land Development Agency could buy the entire estate as it is currently zoned, masterplan it and provide housing that is affordable. Their remit includes, after all, “strategic land assembly and housing delivery”.

Dr Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin

Tom Phillips: Yes, but only if they embrace high-rise and high-density units

Repurposed industrial estates have a continued role in the provision of sites for housing, but must be developed at heights and densities far greater than the former two-storey equivalent industrial sheds.

Millennials working and living in Dublin’s Silicon Docks – the area from the International Financial Services Centre to Barrow Street – would have no memory of and few cues apart from the rejuvenated warehouses at Boland’s Mills and the former Gasworks’ chimney to the area’s former long-established industrial uses.

While not an industrial estate per se, the extensive former docks-related lands have been redeveloped in the last 30 years to provide a major urban quarter housing many large-scale residential buildings as well as the IFSC, the relocated Central Bank and the Convention Centre among others.

Under the last six-year Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022, developers began to examine the redevelopment potential of the two industrially zoned land use classifications to facilitate residential and other uses.

For example, a variation of the plan in 2020 rezoned most of the Goldenbridge Industrial Estate with residential the predominant use.

Dublin City’s Development Plan 2022-2028 identifies two industrial estates for which feasibility studies will be prepared to determine if the lands should be rezoned to allow residential development: the City Edge lands at Naas Road, and Glasnevin’s Dublin Industrial Estate.

[ Dublin industrial site set to be redeveloped for thousands of homes 3km from city centre ]

Building height cannot be off the table in preparing such feasibility studies: to make the best use of former industrial lands, residential development cannot restrict heights greater than two-storey.

The Development Plan sets out 14 different zones (Z1 to Z15 – for superstitious reasons there is no Z13).

Eight two-dimensional coloured plans identify the patchwork of individual zones in which different planning uses (residential, commercial etc) are either “Permitted in Principle”, “Open for Consideration” or “Not Permitted”, respectively – the Planning Authority’s secular version of heaven, purgatory, and hell.

Tall buildings produce a marmite effect

Two of them – Zones 6 (Employment/Enterprise) and 7 (Employment (Heavy) – delineate strategic landbanks for employment creation. Residential use is not permitted under either of the zonings.

Repurposing to allow residential development has “form” not confined to Dublin City Council’s administrative area. In the late 1990s, the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown councillors rezoned Sandyford Industrial Estate to accommodate residential and other mixed-use development, a process still ongoing.

In Cork, the docklands are being repurposed for mixed-use development with residential development of scale at the heart of masterplans, while in Waterford, the city council secured Strategic Development Zone (SDZ) designation for the North Quays from the government in 2016 to facilitate a mixed-use development including 300 apartments. SDZs are designated for development of national economic or social importance to the State so are designated by the Government rather than local authority councillors.

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Three of Ireland’s 11 designated SDZs encompass former industrial lands: Dublin’s Docklands, the North Quays in Waterford and Dublin’s former Irish Glass Bottle site at Poolbeg West.

The latter’s adopted planning scheme permits up to 3,800 residential units; the site can accommodate up to 5,000 units. That equates to some 13,500 people, using a national average household size of 2.7 persons per unit – larger than Castlebar and equivalent to Mallow – on a site of some 15 hectares.

The SDZs and other repurposed industrial estates to date demonstrate that more residential units can be provided if a range of heights are facilitated.

Tall buildings produce a marmite effect: in assessing a proposal for a 37-storey tower on the former Jury’s site in Ballsbridge, the DCC planner wrote that “the strategy of placing landmark buildings in an established urban framework will inevitably produce a variety of responses… These will vary from those who appreciate the new intervention as an exciting and relevant contribution to the city to those who see the new structures as damaging a much-loved locale.”

Ireland’s tallest habitable structure is the Air Traffic Control Tower at Dublin Airport. Ironically, it is one of the last buildings viewed by the other Millennials – those unhoused and Melbourne-bound – for whom the housing market has failed to deliver.

Tom Phillips is managing director of Tom Phillips + Associates Town Planning Consultants, and adjunct associate professor of architecture and planning at UCD