No more one-off houses in Northern Ireland

murphaph · 16-03-2006 2:36pm #1

Crackdown on rural house building
By Mike McKimm
BBC Northern Ireland environment correspondent

The government has moved to end the blight of building single houses at random in the Northern Ireland countryside.

Mourne Mountains area
The Mournes area has recently seen a surge in single house building
From Thursday onwards, new plans will not be considered for single rural dwellings, with few exceptions.

The move ends a stampede which has seen planning departments all but overwhelmed by tens of thousands of speculative plans.

Faced with a move towards more controlled sustainable development in line with the rest of the UK, the planners had little choice but to crack down on this type of housing.

The Department of Regional Development, which announced the move, said that there was ample land already identified for building in all parts of Northern Ireland to cope with housing demand for the next five to 10 years.

But the move is bound to anger developers, builders and would-be rural home owners alike.

Currently three times as many single houses are being built in the countryside in Northern Ireland as in the rest of the UK in any one year.

Move

For example, in the picturesque Mournes area, more than 3,500 new single houses were built in the last four years, angering conservation and environmental groups. They will welcome the latest move.

From now on, only houses for farming families or for retiring farmers will be allowed, and only if the case can be proved.

Some homes will be allowed for key employees for certain types of industries and there will be a special allowance for social need to help young or low-income families stay in rural areas.

The move will anger many farmers who looked to the sale of land for building as part of their income in difficult times.

In the past, some could get as much as £100,000 for a single site. Those days are over.

The move is, in effect, a moratorium, as the policy will not become law until later this year, following a period of public consultation.

But there were fears that this period would encourage literally tens of thousands of additional applications as people tried to beat the eventual ban.

Planning Minister Lord Rooker said that the measures were designed to save the countryside.

"We are wasting the countryside by pepper-potting it with dwellings that are not sustainable - which require motorcars, which require massive numbers of septic tanks, which actually help destroy communities.

"What we need to do is preserve the villages and towns by enabling them to grow."

BBC NI. Now, that's the way to force sustainable development, just ban those silly one-off houses. There are more than enough of them now anyway. The NIO/DRD cearly recognises that sustainability in transport (and other areas) can only be delivered by concentrating people in towns and cities. It just shows you what can be done (albeit done by unelected civil-servants who can't be voted out by hysterical whingers west of the Bann!).

I would dearly love to see the same blanket ban down here but we are going the other bloody way! :mad:

Transport21 Fan · 16-03-2006 2:54pm

Now that's progressive thinking.

Down here, well not far from here between Adare in south Sligo and Swinford in Mayo there is a country road which must have about 80 O'Southforks going up along its route at the moment and many of them are up laneways off the borreen. Meanwhile Swinford and Aclare which are very nice towns have not grown in size that much and many of the people who are moving into these houses are from Swinford and Aclare. It really is depressing and disheartening to see the countryside views being ruined, jammed with traffic and town populations barely growing or declining. Tourism is dying as well.

I see no end in sight either. West of the Shannon in the next few years the countyside will be over populated and the towns underpopulated and it'll be utterly impossible to make public transport of any kind work. God help us if there is a fuel crisis in Ireland and these people who drive up to 40 miles a day to work can't get around. They would be still 20 or so miles from the nearest bus or train services.

One of the ironies of the Western Rail Corridor is that as the population of Connacht greatly expands, the viability of the WRC decreases as nearly all the population growth is in the countryside. Imagine if they all lived in the towns instead - the WRC would start to make sense and what's really annoying is the most pro-WRC folks outhere are also big into the whole one-off housing agenda as well. There is simply no debate on the subject and there never will be.

Benster · 16-03-2006 3:17pm

Can't say I'm over the moon about that news, being from there 'n all, but the report is right about the number of those houses exploding (pardon the pun).

I only hope it doesn't lead to more of another growing phenomenon, that of cramming more houses onto suburban developments than they should comfortably contain. I've seen it happen in Armagh and Crumlin, and it doesn't bode well for the future of town and village growth. Houses are too small, too close together, there are no green areas in the developments and they basically end up looking like council estates.

If folk are no longer able to build one-offs and are forced to buy in larger-scale developments, prices are also going to go up as builders will now be more in control than ever.

"You can't build your own dream house in the country, so you now have to pick one of these I've built in my little over-priced development of 200 houses..."

Interesting times.

B.

Alun · 16-03-2006 3:42pm

The problem to my mind is that in this country it's nigh on impossible for a private individual who wants to build their own house to do so anywhere else but in the middle of nowhere. I'd love to build my own house, but still want to be part of a larger community, but any plot of land that ever comes up for sale in the area where I live is immediately snapped up by some property developer to build dozens of apartments on it. If decent sized building plots were actually to be made available closer to centres of population then I'm sure there'd be a ready demand for them, but as it is there isn't.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a choice between a 3,000sq.ft. dormer in a field in the middle of nowhere and a tiny 2 bedroom townhouse in a massive estate of identical shoeboxes.

Transport21 Fan · 16-03-2006 5:20pm

Alun wrote:

The problem to my mind is that in this country it's nigh on impossible for a private individual who wants to build their own house to do so anywhere else but in the middle of nowhere. I'd love to build my own house, but still want to be part of a larger community, but any plot of land that ever comes up for sale in the area where I live is immediately snapped up by some property developer to build dozens of apartments on it. If decent sized building plots were actually to be made available closer to centres of population then I'm sure there'd be a ready demand for them, but as it is there isn't.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a choice between a 3,000sq.ft. dormer in a field in the middle of nowhere and a tiny 2 bedroom townhouse in a massive estate of identical shoeboxes.

That would defeat the whole purpose of clustered development. You can't have "sites" in towns. I have no problem with people building their dream homes in the country but it is out of control right now and the main reason for this is that the government is essentially subsidising the one off houses. If people in rural one-off houses had to pay the full costs of their idyll it would be very expensive for them personally. Right now, the Irish taxpayer is making it easy to live in the countryside in huge numbers. But it's really a ticking timebomb in many ways and this over development will eventually collaspe in on itself becuase it won't be sustainable after a critical mass has been reached. In fact, we have already pass that point. The ground water pollution is getting worse and not better and this is caused in no small part by septic tank run off from rural houses.

More than anything else the Irish countryside has an asesthic economic value which has sustained this country through bleak econimic times by providing the tourist with some natural and beautiful scenery to look at. When that's gone it is gone forever. During the last recession the tourists were paying to see unspoilt views - during the next one they are not going to pay to see a suburb. This is were we are heading.

Maskhadov · 16-03-2006 5:22pm

best news i heard in a long time. One of housing should be made illegal in the republic and peple can live in towns and cities

Alun · 16-03-2006 5:28pm

Transport21 Fan wrote:

That would defeat the whole purpose of clustered development. You can't have "sites" in towns.

Why the hell not? I think you totally misunderstood the point of my post. I moved here from the Netherlands. There, when a new housing development is planned (yes, planned!) they often set aside a part of the development as individual plots for self-builders. Can't see what's wrong with that? You get the chance to build the house you want, rather than what some developer thinks you want, plus you get the advantages of living in a 'clustered development'.

murphaph · 16-03-2006 5:32pm

http://www.archiseek.com/content/showpost.php?p=49186&postcount=4. MT sums it up in this post on archiseek. Sad but probably true. I wonder will leaving the union ultimately be responsible for the irish countryside being destroyed by our own greed.

Transport21 Fan · 16-03-2006 5:37pm

Alun wrote:

Why the hell not? I think you totally misunderstood the point of my post. I moved here from the Netherlands. There, when a new housing development is planned (yes, planned!) they often set aside a part of the development as individual plots for self-builders. Can't see what's wrong with that? You get the chance to build the house you want, rather than what some developer thinks you want, plus you get the advantages of living in a 'clustered development'.

I agree that developers buy most of the plots around towns up, but I would be against urban one-off houses as much as rural ones. In Ireland it would just lead to abuses. The size of the sites would be huge and in the middle of a city you would have a house with a giant front and back garden becuase more Irish people consider this their birthright - which is how most of Dublin was built in the 1950's and why places like Drumcondra and Glasnevin have such small populations despite being within walking distance of central Dublin. Not good for the greater good.

Give me greedy developers filling a site with apartments that urban O'Southforks anyday.

paulm17781 · 16-03-2006 5:47pm

Transport21 Fan wrote:

Give me greedy developers filling a site with apartments that urban O'Southforks anyday.

The problem is people don't want to live in apartments. I live in the city centre in an apartment, I like it there. I know I will end up in a house. Irish people look at apartments as something you buy until you can afford a house. Blanket ban on one off housing and high rise in the city is needed. Along with proper apartment blocks with recreational facilities for the people who live in them. I wouldn't dream of raising a kid in my place as there is nothing for them to do.

Alun · 16-03-2006 5:55pm

Transport21 Fan wrote:

I agree that developers buy most of the plots around towns up, but I would be against urban one-off houses as much as rural ones. In Ireland it would just lead to abuses. The size of the sites would be huge and in the middle of a city you would have a house with a giant front and back garden becuase more Irish people consider this their birthright - which is how most of Dublin was built in the 1950's and why places like Drumcondra and Glasnevin have such small populations despite being within walking distance of central Dublin. Not good for the greater good.

The reason I want to build my own house is not to have some massive rambling house in the middle of a 2.5 acre field with room for stables for the polo ponies, but because I want to live in a modern house that actually looks like it was designed by a proper architect rather than copied out of a book of 1950's house designs, and that is properly built to modern standards, especially in the area of insulation etc. I've no problem doing that within roughly the same footprint that the average house here currently commands, and as part of an existing community but I have no chance of achieving this because the building plots simply aren't available.

Listen, I'm as against the scourge of one-off housing in the countryside as you are, but I don't see why a bit of individualism in house design can't be incorporated into the system somehow, instead of forcing everyone to live in estates of 200+ identical houses or apartments.

Where I lived in the Netherlands was a massive estate, even by Irish standards, but, and it's a big "but", you'd be pushed to find more than about a dozen identical houses in the entire estate. There were terraced houses, low-rise apartments, semi's, detached, architect designed 'villas', owner-occupied, subsidised, rental and local authority housing all mixed up together. Things are done differently over there though, and the land was split up between the many developers by the local council, and each developer would have a number of different parcels of land allocated to them, rather than just leaving the whole estate to one single developer as happens here.

Alun · 16-03-2006 6:00pm

paulm17781 wrote:

The problem is people don't want to live in apartments. I live in the city centre in an apartment, I like it there. I know I will end up in a house. Irish people look at apartments as something you buy until you can afford a house. Blanket ban on one off housing and high rise in the city is needed. Along with proper apartment blocks with recreational facilities for the people who live in them. I wouldn't dream of raising a kid in my place as there is nothing for them to do.

Well that's the market Irish apartments seem to be marketed to. They're all "exlusive", "lavishly appointed", "luxurious" (and therefore expensive) etc. etc. aimed at the DINKY's and singles out there, and rarely of a size suitable for bringing up a family in. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and in many countries in Europe people manage perfectly well to bring up children in apartments, but then there are open spaces, playgrounds etc. which you'll struggle to find in a typical Irish apartment development.

BrianD · 16-03-2006 6:40pm

The answer is simple. Property tax on second and additional homes. It makes sense but I don't think any politician will be suggesting it!!!

murphaph · 16-03-2006 7:44pm

BrianD wrote:

The answer is simple. Property tax on second and additional homes. It makes sense but I don't think any politician will be suggesting it!!!

While I agree with the notion of property taxation on additional homes, it'd take more than that. I know about 6 people with one-offs they built and none of them own anything else.

Ireland is steadily losing it's beauty. We don't even have much by way of national parks to preserve. Cavan is a disaster. As soon as you cross from Meath you can see the blight begin. Cavan used to have beautiful lakelands, all surrounded by 3000 sq ft monsters now I'm afraid.

No more one-off houses in Northern Ireland

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