URBAN SPRAWL IS bad – it makes delivering infrastructure harder, it creates long commute times, is land-intensive, it’s bad for the environment, it’s...
And so on and so on. Most people in Ireland know all of this already. And yet sprawl keeps happening.
While apartments accounted for almost three-quarters of new home completions in Dublin last year, outside of the capital, housing estates are still king. Figures from the Central Statistics Office show that just under 33,000 homes were delivered last year. Of that amount, 11,600 were apartments.
Almost all of these – 9,000 – were in Dublin. However, still the most popular were ‘scheme’ dwellings. Just over 15,500 of these units, which refers to new housing estates, were built in 2023.
One-off housing and self-builds accounted for the rest. So new housing estates are still the most popular form of development across Ireland, especially outside of Dublin, with people increasingly being pushed out of the capital in the hunt for more affordable accommodation. But why is this, given all we know about the long-term negative impacts of urban sprawl? It’s likely due, at least in part, to the old adage: ‘What gets measured gets done.
’ While most people know in theory that urban sprawl is bad, in practise, very few people have ever attempted to put firm numbers on its real-world financial impact. This has a knock-on effect – while central government favours denser housing, local councils, who are the ones calling .