Sadhbh O’Neill: No. This type of housing comes with higher energy demands, transport costs and emissions
A permissive approach to one-off dwellings leads to community fragmentation, increased car dependency, strained public services and higher costs of providing essential infrastructure.
On average, about one-fifth of all planning permissions every year, or about 5,000 dwellings, are granted for single rural houses in the Republic. Five thousand might not sound like much, but over 10 years that is 50,000 units. Between 420,000-550,000 of all dwellings in the State are one-off houses.
Meanwhile, The Republic now has a growing population and the cost of housing has spiralled out of control. More young people than ever are unable to afford to live in the communities in which they grew up. Urban housing everywhere – which in theory at least should be more compact and sustainable – is in short supply and more costly. The lack of serviced sites in towns and villages means that people are often forced to look to more rural locations in which to buy a site and build a home. If insufficient land is zoned in rural areas and no social and affordable housing supplied, there will inevitably be increased demand for one-off housing to accommodate local needs. The demand for rural housing also comes from returning emigrants, retirees, wealthier commuters and those who want second or holiday homes. The result is that many people are leaving cities, especially Dublin, to avail of lower housing costs by instead shouldering long commutes to work.
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Interventions are badly needed to break this cycle of rising housing costs and unaffordability, but they should not come at the expense of the environment or human wellbeing. In terms of environmental sustainability, one-off housing comes with higher energy demands, increased transport costs and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions.
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The built environment and construction activities contribute significantly to our climate impact. Dispersed housing negatively impacts the urban fabric of towns and villages, which are hollowed out as the population moves to rural areas. Bringing vacant properties back into use should be the top priority of housing and spatial planning policy. Aside from the social benefits, reusing existing buildings reduces the embodied carbon in new construction.
The spatial inequalities that result from a permissive approach to one-off housing are rarely acknowledged. While planning permissions are by no means automatic, those who own land can seek to build on it or sell sites. Those who don’t are at the mercy of the housing market or landlords. Rural public representatives often make the case for one-off housing as a fix for the housing crisis, which is an acknowledgment of the complete failure of successive governments to anticipate and plan for housing needs. Rural politicians leap to the defence of hard cases, but the real impacts are rarely articulated: the erosion of our towns and villages; failure to plan for future population growth; and the absence of affordable housing that condemns people to potential isolation and a lifestyle that requires a car journey for everything.
Those politicians who claim they are defending the rights of rural people to live in the areas from which they originate seem to perceive planning as a set of unreasonable restrictions, instead of a social contract that benefits everyone equally.
In all these debates, environmental and social costs are swept aside, as though they are simply inconvenient truths. The current and proposed policy for rural housing in the revised draft National Planning Framework is essentially not to have a policy. The phenomenon of dispersed housing as a social reality has been normalised to the degree that there is very little political appetite for a radical change in planning policy, but when we fail to plan, we plan to fail.
- Sadhbh Ó’Neill is a researcher and lecturer in climate and energy law at TU Dublin.
Tomás Finn and Tony Varley: Yes. The State’s commitment to the policy of sustainable one-off rural housing will remain strong
A notable feature of sustainable development is that its three distinguishable constituent pillars – environmental, economic and social – can potentially come into conflict with one another. Nowhere is this clearer than in the perennially vexed question of one-off rural housing. Given the underlying potential for conflict, the politics of one-off rural housing in the Republic typically revolve around three critical considerations: how sustainability is viewed and which of its pillars are prioritised by different interests; relative power of the relevant interests; and how the politics of sustainability play out in practice and implementation.
On on side of the debate, environmentalists and planners identify a plethora of environmental, economic and social dangers posed by one-off rural housing. They point to the cost of servicing the large and ever-expanding number of one-off houses, the negative impact of inadequately maintained septic tanks for water quality, car dependence, the inflated size and negative visual impact of some one-off houses, and the way urban-generated holiday and second-house ownership has tended to squeeze locals out of the housing market in scenic areas.
However the State has, historically, prioritised social and economic considerations over environmental ones. New rural housing guidelines introduced in 2005 were informed by the conviction that “the most important ingredient in rural development is population” and that “policies on rural housing must be responsive to the dispersed patterns of settlement in Ireland”. That said, the new 2005 guidelines distinguished between four rural area types for development plan purposes – areas under strong urban influence, stronger rural areas, structurally weak areas and areas with clustered settlement patterns.
Given the scale of this housing crisis, the continuing high demand for new one-off rural houses, and composition of this Government, there is every likelihood that the State’s commitment to the policy of “sustainable” one-off rural housing will remain strong.
As long as it can be delivered on a truly sustainable basis, it should continue to be supported. It is now broadly accepted that the sustainability of rural communities and balanced regional growth provide powerful arguments for a regulated one-off rural housing policy, that many of the negative environmental effects associated with one-off rural housing can be mitigated by a combination of technological advances and State interventions. The Republic, for instance, is already committed to stimulating (with improved grants) as well as regulating better septic–tank maintenance. In the longer term, grant-aiding the widespread adoption of home-based electricity generation in rural areas, as well as a decarbonising shift to electric vehicles, are not beyond the bounds of political possibility.
It may be that as time passes and the climate crisis deepens more menacingly, the environmental dimension of sustainability will trump the social and economic dimensions of sustainability where our one-off rural housing policy is concerned.
Clearly, in such circumstances, the politics of striking a balance – however shifting and precarious – between our three dimensions of sustainability will become all the more complex and testing. Future population and climate projections are such that housing needs demand a proactive response which addresses environmental as well as social and economic needs.
- Tomás Finn lectures in the school of history and philosophy at University of Galway. Tony Varley lectures in the social sciences research centre at University of Galway. They recently co-edited Inside Rural Ireland: Power and Change since Independence which is available through UCD Press.
