State deputy planning regulator Anne Marie O’Connor voiced strong opinions at a recent Dublin City Council housing seminar regarding the need for “evidence-based” zoning. She recommended a move away from blanket zoning, or “colouring yellow across a development plan, hoping that something will happen”.
She said that councils needed to ensure that development plans became “action plans” for the delivery of homes.
Ms O’Connor went as far as to say that the rate of housing construction on land zoned by councillors was “absolutely shocking”, with only one in six zoned sites seeing an application for homes during the lifetime of a development plan. She added that local authorities should not revert to a “back of the fag packet approach” to the drafting of their development plans.
“There is a one in six chance a piece of zoned land will come forward for development in its planned period, and if we want to be trying to direct development into the right places for the right reasons, we have to change the way we have been looking at that traditionally, because we know where that has led us,” she commented.
Ms O’Connor recently made a submission to the draft Dublin City Development Plan on behalf of the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) instructing the council not to go ahead with a number of restrictions on build-to-rent (BTR) schemes as the council was breaching national policies and ministerial guidelines.
She acknowledged that some might find mandatory planning guidelines difficult, but in her view, they provide clarity around certain issues that are deemed to be key. “You may not like some of them but that is their purpose.”
She said a “friction” that does not work well for the planning system or for planning outcomes comes about when local authorities do not apply national policies it created. “The idea that clear breaches of national planning policies can be facilitated within the planning system and that is in some way going to lead to good outcomes I think is a flawed way of thinking”.
Ms O’Connor stated that there was room for councils to define appropriate housing mixes for particular areas.