New Homes: Menu of solutions to soaring demand for housing
We tend to go around in circles as well as cycles, and it’s as obvious in housing as it is in many other areas of government policy: just look at the acknowledgement across all sectors that one method of speeding up home delivery is off-site and modular home construction … but that’s nothing new.This country was delivering system-built homes over half a century ago, the new president of the Construction Industry Federation Cork builder Stepehen McCarthy wryly noted at a recent CIF function: he said his very first job in the trade (in which he still is actively in the trenches!) was doing foundations for the so-called Rohfab homes, built with prefabricated modular concrete panels delivered on site.Popular in the 1970s, and with the majority still standing, Rohfab builds popped up from the back of trucks and were ready within a week for ‘first fix,’ but the method didn’t become mainstream.“They were built too fast,” said McCarthy who himself has delivered over 2,000 homes over his 50 year and ongoing home building career. Complaints of being too fast are surely not relevant in 2025 when we need 300,000 new homes by 2030?We don’t just have to look back 50 years for solutions to the desperate housing crisis — though it might also be no harm to re-energise the spirit of the Kenny Report of decades back which sought to cap land values for the common good?Before letting another report sit on a shelf as the Kenny Report did, the new government would do well to look back at the report of the Housing Commission for thoughtful suggestions which didn’t get much political purchase or buy-in at the launch time last year: how about setting up the Housing Delivery Oversight Executive which the Commission proposed, with legislative powers to clear some of the many acknowledge blockages in planning and delivery of services and supply?(It’s felt that government may favour some ‘special forces’ unit within the Department of Housing to coordinate delivery of service like water and power with appropriately zoned and available land).While the needs are huge, the system is a slow ship to turn around: dispiritingly, there’s a wide acceptance that output this year won’t be much more than the 31,000 or so units which were finished in 2024. The 40,000 units vaunted by the main government parties in the run up to the General Election as being a likely outturn for last year was wayward, if not willfully wrong.Realism, and honesty, please.Yet, as of now, there’s no sense of real crisis response action: as many kites as might be flown in the run-up to an election, or to a budget, seem to be being aired and flown high right now to gauge societal response?Tax breaks for builders? Scrapping rent caps? Encourage in private investment to finance much of the €20bn annual spend needed to get to 50,000 units and more a year?Cabins in back gardens? Help to Buy grants for secondhand homes? Expand the price cap thresholds for Help to Buy and First Home Schemes?Sorting planning and infrastructure is priority Number One, and funds are there now thanks to Apple windfalls etc, the challenge is to get boots on the ground and staff up bodies like Uisce Éireann. Yet to be seen is how the gargantuan new Planning Bill will work out, nearly 900 pages long and likely to have provisions as strongly contested by vested interests and objectors as any previous procedures: remember that currently, there are close to 20,000 housing units are awaiting decision under the Strategic Housing Development (SHD) planning process for almost two years … the SHD process was originally supposed to take 16 weeks! An infrastructure or Housing Czar (yes, with executive powers à la Trump?) or a delivery oversight executive could expedite decisions on such applications, providing swifter and substantial increase in housing supply, and work on disentangling the bottlenecks that clog our system, and stall and choke the futures of an entire generation of family formation age. The need is beyond urgent. Political will must strengthen to take hard and fast and fair decisions, many of which will be controversial, and inadvertent side effects, with multi-factorial challenges. We’ll be arguing about the housing crisis still, when the next General Election rolls around.Rohfabs in the meanwhile?
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