FF Apartment scheme Croí Cónaithe Cities fails to deliver
FF Apartment scheme Croí Cónaithe Cities fails to deliver - The Labour Party
- Only 1,083 of planned 5,000 apartments by 2026 in progress.
- Minister doubles down on failing scheme with tweaks that won’t deliver new apartments.- New approach needed to deliver apartment building at scale.
Labour Housing spokesperson Conor Sheehan has highlighted the abject failure of one of Fianna Fáil’s flagship housing policies, the €450m Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme, that has progressed just a fifth of the projected number of apartments expected when it launched in 2022.
Deputy Sheehan said:“When then Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien launched the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme to activate apartment construction in 2022, he committed €450 million up to 2026 with the aim of delivering 5,000 new build apartments. The scheme was to activate some of the estimated 70,000 uncommenced planning permissions for apartments.
“The current Minister for Housing revealed today that in three years only 1,083 apartments or just over a fifth of the planned new builds have been delivered or entered into contract on. To be clear many of these still aren’t built. Even if the applications for the further 1,600 apartments that he confirmed today had been received were all delivered, only half of the projected new apartments originally planned under the scheme would be delivered by 2026.
“Every day it becomes clearer how Fianna Fáil’s housing plan has utterly failed, and how voters were totally misled in the last election. This was a flagship scheme for Fianna Fáil designed to support private developers with no strings attached grants and yet it has failed to deliver over a number of years.
“Today the Minister has made a new call seeking expressions of interest, but the failed scheme hasn’t worked for three years, and won’t deliver the level of building now needed to address the chronic undersupply of new homes. Croí Cónaithe (Cities) is a bad scheme, the densities don’t work, and it appears to be unviable outside of Dublin, and maybe Cork, having delivered nothing to date in Limerick, Waterford and Cork.
“In March I questioned the Minister in the Dáil on his plans to address apartment viability. He had no new solutions then, and his only plan now is to reduce the threshold for applying for this scheme from 40 units to 20, in order to attract more applications. However the evidence shows that developers aren’t budging on their uncommenced planning permissions and a new approach is needed.
“Labour has called on the LDA to take a much more proactive role in the delivery of apartments, and it should now be seeking to take over these sites and planning permissions and progress these planning permissions to construction. The state has the financial resources to do this now, and as Labour outlined in our manifesto, the private sector is failing to deliver, and private investors are seeking higher returns then the rental market can bear.
“At a minimum we believe when the state is subsidising private developers to deliver new apartment complexes, that those homes should be made available for cost rental, and affordable purchase through local authorities.”