This week saw Avestus Capital / Richmond Homes lodge a new planning permission for a staggering 564 apartments in blocks up to eighteen stories high on a 1.54 hectare / 3.8 acre site in Sandyford.
The site, which is located across the road from the Stillorgan LUAS stop, was sold with full planning permission for 459 apartments by NAMA in February of this year. The company that purchased the site, Avestus Capital, has now gone back to planning to try cram an additional 105 apartments onto the site.
Speaking in relation to the planning application, local Éirígí representative Brian Leeson said, ‘Eighteen months ago myself and others started to highlight the fact that NAMA was in effective control of a site in Sandyford with full planning permission for 460 homes.
We repeatedly called for the government to intervene so that the site could be handed over to our local council and developed as Universal Public Housing. This would have provided hundreds of local families from all income backgrounds with affordable, secure homes in their own community. Almost 4,000 people signed an online petition supporting that demand.
Petition signed by almost 4,000 people relating to the Sandyford site was delivered to the offices of Pascal Donohoe by Dundrum Housing Action. Donohoe had the legal power and financial budget to bring the land into full public ownership, but chose not to.
But in the end the Paschal Donohoe and Eoghan Murphy refused to intervene and NAMA sold the site on the open market to Avestus.
The plans that Avestus, and their construction wing Richmond Homes, submitted this week are designed to generate maximum rental income by cramming the highest possible number of individual apartments onto this relatively small site.
When compared to the existing planning permission the number of ‘studio’ apartments balloons from just one studio to 46 and the number of one-bedroom apartments more than doubles from 92 to 205.
Under the revised planning regulations that Eoghan Murphy brought in last year, these studio apartments can be as small as 35 square meters (375 square feet) and the one-bedroom apartments aren’t a whole lot bigger.
At the same time the new planning application reduces the number of two-bedroom apartments from 303 to 295 and the number of three-bedroom apartments is slashed from 63 apartments to just 18.
Planning application contains details of the numbers of ‘studio' and other apartments
The legislation was changed by Murphy following intensive lobbying by institutional landlords that wanted to cram as many ‘units’ as possible onto a piece of ground. These BTR complexes are driven by the desire for maximum profit, not the development of well-balanced, long-term, stable communities.
The fact that the planning application contains just 18 three-bedroom apartments out of a total of 564 apartments says all that needs to be said. The developers aren’t interested in providing long-term homes for families, because there’s more profit to be made renting out shoeboxes at extortionate monthly rents. And the government are facilitating it.
This planning application is being lodged for permanent rental accommodation, which is now being built to a different standard to regular apartments. This means that we’re stuck we’ll be stuck with hundreds of sub-standard apartments for decades to come that will never be suitable for owner-occupier families.
This sort of development will do nothing to help the housing needs of people in Dundrum, Sandyford or the surrounding areas. I’ll be lodging my own objection to this development to An Bord Pleanála and would encourage everyone else to do likewise.
And we in Éirígí in Dublin South will be working with others on the streets to build opposition to this development being granted permission and going ahead.”