Is it a new development to help Dublin solve its social housing crisis, or a developer boondoggle to turn a tidy profit with slight-of-hand shell game in which it’s easy to discover the pea, but harder to notice that it has shrunk?
Or . . . is it a trendy downtown high-rise development — offering access and amenities instead of living space — so flashy and futuristic that it doesn’t even need to be downtown?
Shopworn affordable housing promises guaranteed to go unfulfilled are these days joined by newer, even more inventive schemes for extracting local and national support, as developers “help” Ireland tackle critical housing needs.
It takes pliable local and national governments to overlook some of the glaring disadvantages of public private partnership development schemes, whether the “ask” from developers is permission, land, funding, or all of the above.
There are growing signs that Irish governments are becoming less pliable.
The supposed glories of “co-living” high rises have been measured up and found wanting by the national government. Read more in the Irish Times: Minister for Housing to ban new co-living developments and Co-living no longer ‘trendy’ as it succumbs to political change of direction
Meanwhile, Dublin City councillors embarrass their own government staff by nixing a proposed PPP scheme that will eat up public housing and spit fewer units back. Read more in Independent.ie : Dublin City Council’s wine into water housing policies
