Co-Living In Dún Laoghaire

at

Plans (and schematics, H/T: Cian) submitted to An Bord Pleanála by Bartra Capital for the redevelopment of the former CBS school in Eblana Avenue, Dun Laoghaire (top)

Fionnuala Walsh in The Times Ireland edition reports:

Opposition is growing to a “Dickensian” development in Dublin that proposes to house tenants in rooms smaller than a disabled parking space and have up to 42 residents sharing a kitchen.

The “co-living” plans for a former Christian Brothers’ school on Eblana Avenue in Dún Laoghaire have been submitted to An Bord Pleanála by Bartra Capital.

If approved, the scheme will offer residents rooms with a pull-down double bed, a shower, lavatory, sink, kettle, mini-fridge and storage with communal kitchen and living areas for a minimum €1,300 a month.

The five-storey building will have 208 bedrooms, with up to 42 bedrooms on a floor. The rooms will be 16.25 square metres — a disabled parking space is typically at least 17 square metres.

‘Dickensian’ co-living offers rooms smaller than a disabled parking bay (The Times Ireland edition)

Meanwhile….

Any excuse.

Sponsored Link

74 thoughts on “Co-Living In Dún Laoghaire

  1. missred

    Student halls in my old college weren’t even this small. And for that price and no privacy? This must be refused, it’s embarrassing that this plan got through to the submission stages.

    1. Cian

      This picture is from the outside. You are looking at the windows.
      See link below for a top view.

      1. Paulus

        Yes; this is an elevation as opposed to a plan:
        I wanted to be an architect but didn’t get the points – not that they were called points back then.

    2. George

      I see now, I think the plan view was added after my comment or else I just missed it.

      1. Cian

        I’d rather live there than many of the “crying chair” rooms that are a regular feature on Broadsheet.

        We need to address housing needs in Dublin. We can get 208 people (couples?) like this, or go for more traditional apartments and in the same building get perhaps 80 1-bed (45sq m) apartments? or 50 2-bed (73 sq m) apartments?

        I think we need to have a mix of this style of accommodation, as well as 1, 2, and 3 bed apartments, and more traditional houses.

        1. Termagant

          NO
          We need NONE of this style of accommodation, just the 1,2,3 bed apartments will do grand thanks
          You are WRONG Cian

          1. Cian

            Why not?
            This is equivalent to the big houses in Rathmines/Rathgar (and other places) that were subdivided into pokey flats. Except it is more modern, and has way better facilities.

            It’s not a home for life – it’s a starter pad for people leaving school/college while they gain their independence, get some work experience, and save for their own place.

          2. Termagant

            It’s a starter pad that costs 1300 a month Cian, no college-leaver is saving for the future and also paying that and also living on more than two tins of beans a week

          3. Qwerty123

            @Cian, agreed, but 1300pm is a rip off. Would suit the Facebook and Google Euro types who get free Breakfast lunch and dinner mon-Fri and eat out at weekends.

            Friend of mine lived in something similar in Washington DC, was pretty sweet and well maintained. But given this is Ireland, it wont be maintained and the DC place was, from memory, 900USD per month.

          4. Cian

            @Qwerty123
            I totally agree €1300 is a rip-off; but prices are due to lack of supply.
            Adding 208+ beds in Dun Laoghaire will go toward helping that. If we get a load more building (of this, and 1-, 2-, 3- bed apartments, and traditional houses) then the prices will get under control…. and this 1300 may fall.

        2. Barry the Hatchet

          But, in a functioning housing market, who in god’s name does this kind of accommodation appeal to? At that price, it’s certainly not students, people on low incomes, or people just starting out in their career, etc. Even for two people sharing a room, you’d have to be earning decent enough money to be able to afford €650 per month in rent.

          This just strikes me as substandard accommodation, which would not ordinarily appeal to anyone, but which will be snapped up now because people are desperate. It’s pretty terrible planning policy to allow substandard developments to take advantage of our dysfunctional housing market.

          1. Owen C

            Lease terms will be very flexible (2-12 months), so its aimed, it would seem, at transient workers (foreign workers on contract/short term stay, commuting with family overseas). We may need to consider that not everyone wants to sign a 12 month lease, that not everyone wants to share an apartment with someone else (often the person owning the apartment), and that not everyone requires a full set of normal mod-cons like kitchen, tv room etc. What Dublin is crying out for is a wide variety of accommodation types that goes beyond 2 bed apartments and 3 bed semi ds.

          2. Janet, I ate my avatar

            it will make landlords with a shed think sure I can get even more for this, normalized crap standards are not the answer

          3. Qwerty123

            @Barry – suits the Facebook and Google Euro types who get free Breakfast lunch and dinner mon-Fri and eat out at weekends.

            they are on good money, and don’t intend to stay in Ireland long term and generally go home 2/3 times per month

          4. Owen C

            Think of Brexit-relocations types. Working in Dublin, family still in London. Go home every Friday. Social activities mainly/only with work colleagues. All they want is a bed and a private space for clothes etc. Gym and cinema and cafe/restaurant downstairs give them amenities. I’d hazard a guess you end up with very few Irish people living in it.

        3. Marielouise

          Agree 100% ….this is really for single people. It is accommodation which has a minimum and maximum staying period…it’s not meant as a long term solution for our housing problem…it’s super for someone young on a good salary and really only passing through….this is the way forward.

  2. Bort

    I’m not one for civil unrest but I will chain myself to a jcb if this crime gets the go ahead. 1.3 k a month!

  3. Nilbert

    These would be ideal for a generous but sensible sugar daddy who wanted to set up a frisky young thing in budget-conscious style.

  4. johnny

    -thanks Eoghan.
    ” In its Q1 2019 quarterly report, estate agency CBRE suggested “an increasing number of investors are now looking for opportunities to invest in the development of micro-living and co-living concepts, which they perceive to be particularly appropriate in a Dublin context”, predicting an increase in the volume of planning applications for co-living concepts.

    “It wasn’t possible to do this until Eoghan Murphy changed the planning code last year,” says Marie Hunt, executive director and head of research at CBRE.

    “Up until then, the planning code stated things like if you want to build an apartment it has to be much the same regardless of who was in it, with things like dual-aspect and a car- parking space whether you wanted it or not.”

    https://bartracapitalproperty.com/small-but-perfectly-formed-is-co-living-the-new-co-working/

  5. class wario

    Grim and hilarious in equal measure that they try to flog these shoeboxes for exorbitant amounts on top of it all.

      1. The Old Boy

        You could pretend it’s like the start of You Only Live Twice, I suppose.

  6. George

    15,600 a year to live in a shoe box. Good luck saving for a deposit. What happens to these people when they are old? Where are they going to live when they retire after spending their whole lives paying rent?

    1. Cian

      I paid £650/month to live in a “shoe-box” in Rathmines in the 90s. Granted it was a little bigger than these and had a cooker! But it was in a big old converted house with no facilities. £650 in 1996 was worth about €1240 in 2018… so €1300 for these is the same ballpark as I was paying 25 years ago.

      1. George

        If what you say is true your rent was 28% of the average industrial wage compare to these which will be 36% of the average industrial wage. So your flat was significantly cheaper.

        Two wrongs don’t make a right though, in the late 80s the house I lived in had no central heating.

        1. Cian

          Are you sure? CSO says average weekly earnings are:

          Year weekly annual Rent
          1996 €360 €18,720 £650 = €9,900/year [53%]
          2015 €685 €35,620 €1,300 = €15,600/year [44%]

          So it is cheaper today.

          1. johnny

            My father used tell me as a child when i complained,that when he was growing up he had walk school,holding in his little hands a hot potato.The potato warmed his hands and then served as his lunch, of course he made whole thing up,Cian the endless anecdotes remind me of my fathers tall tales.

          2. Cian

            “endless anecdotes”? like a whole two. This month (both today).

            I try to separate facts (which I tend to back up) from personal experience – and explicitly state the difference – to allow you decide which to give more weight to.

          3. johnny

            -the early 90’s called they want you back,FFFs its a diversionary tactic and an attempt at normalizing this-who cares where you lived back in day or what you paid,WTF has that go do with Murphy changing the planning laws for Barrett and his investors ?
            -most likely he overpaid for the site needs ram in as many units as possible.

        1. Cian

          none.
          But it was an old house, without a gym, cinema, or games room.
          There was a coin-operated washing machine/tumble dryer in the basement :)

        1. Cian

          It wasn’t a bed-sit. It was quite posh. It had it’s own toilet and shower. There was a “kitchen” (a large cupboard with a cooker, fridge, and perhaps 3 presses – no room to sit). And a communal payphone in the hall! LOL

          The house did have a few bedsits – there was a communal bathroom for them.

          I’m quite sure of the price. it started at £600 and got bumped to £650.

          1. Cian

            That is possible.

            Remember that inflation was high in the 90s. There was 44% increase in (average) wages between 1990 and 1999 and a 144% increase in (average) house prices. I don’t have rent statistics to hand, but I would image that there would have been similar rent increase through the 90s.

          2. BobbyJ

            You’re now spinning to try cover your lie, Cian. You didn’t pay 650 punt for your “shoe-box” in Rathmines in 1996.

            Why can’t you just accept that the above proposal by Bartra Capital (Richard “Keep Pulling for Us” Barrett) is a new low for Irish property developers?

          3. Cian

            You are right, my dates were out. It was actually £600 in 1997 upped to £650 in 1998.

            Inflation wise: £650 in 1998 is worth about €1,193 in 2018. (I said €1,240 earlier – sorry)

            Saying that, if these apartments had been available back then I would have preferred to live in one of them than that place in Rathmines.

    1. Tony

      It pains me to contradict another Futurame fan Liam but the Robot Arms apartments were very spacious. Fry discovered that Bender was only living in the closet

        1. Spaghetti Hoop

          I was obsessed. I found my box sets recently and scheduling a re-binge.

      1. George

        Sorry, Tony. Fry lived in the closet. The joke was that robot’s have bigger closets than apartments and prefer to store themselves in a smaller space not having human needs.

  7. class wario

    what’s the average price of a room in a house share in Dublin these days? 700-800 euro? also an example of the effects of the housing crisis but still closer to ‘reasonable’ than 1300 is. I don’t really see who these are meant to be marketed to.

  8. ____

    Looks like one of the big reasons for the design was to sidestep the painfully outdated rule that all dwellings must be dual-aspect.

  9. Andrew

    I’m not against the idea for this type of accommodation, if it were to provide people on low incomes/students a place to live and eventually move on having been able to save some money to get a better place. At €1300 a month that doesn’t work.
    It’s incredible that this is where we are at in this country.
    I never though we could get government that could do more damage to the country than the last Fianna Faíl Ahern/Cowen government or the previous disasters of Jack Lynch and Charlie Haughey.
    However, Fine Gael are actually outdoing them with regard to social damage. Do they not realise that the voters they rely on have children who will want a sustainable country to live in?
    Any young person would be mad to stay in Ireland now.
    FG will reap what they sow at the ballot box.

  10. Zaccone

    These are absolutely horrifying. 1300eur a month to live in a room the size of a car parking space, with a fold down bed. With no ability to have friends over. With what looks like 4 cookers shared between 42 people (!!).

    The idea of “shared living” for people in their early 20s with lower costs isn’t a bad one, but there needs to be a certain level of comfort. And a reasonable price. Student accommodation costs about half of this, and involves 4 or 5 bedrooms to a shared sitting room/cooker. Thats much more palatable. And still presumably very profitable to a developer – approx 3500e a month income in an apartment not much larger than a “normal” 2bedroom one.

  11. kellMA

    I mean if this was a quick measure to try deal with short term housing for the homeless, OK maybe but come on….

  12. martco

    ALSO

    1) this term “CO-LIVING” since when did it ever enter the vernacular??? well you can read all about that here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliving

    “Coliving is similar to single room occupancy as it offers residents an individual space in a shared property. Most typically a private room with an ensuite bathroom, however shared bathrooms are not uncommon and at lower prices spaces have dormitories in the same manner as a hostel”

    more fancy-arse language to hide the obvious. I call it TENEMENTS.

    2) if you want to see what this could be all about there’s a well known example of it over yonder called Marmalade Lane, see this Guardian article only published yesterday:
    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/08/marmalade-lane-co-housing-cambridge

    THIS is nothing like that project. just more psstake. congrats. we have now started to reach the bottom of the pond.

  13. Janet, I ate my avatar

    it’s disgusting
    it’s a way around not getting permission for another hotel

  14. Reginaldo

    Whoever came up with the disabled parking analogy can’t do basic arithmetic. Very sad that journalistic standards are sacrificed to deliver a stupid and inaccurate headline!

Comments are closed.

Sponsored Link
Broadsheet.ie