Dan Boyle: The Sextant That Lost Its Way

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From top: aerial view of the 16-storey office tower block planned for Albert Quay, Cork at the grounds of the old Sextant Bar; Dan Boyle

I should have seen this coming. It’s a tactic that has been used far too frequently by greedy developers out to maximise profit. Nevertheless, the audacity of proposing this has shocked me. I had hoped we had left this kind of behaviour behind us.

Nine months ago, The Sextant Bar in Cork was unnecessarily demolished. Ostensibly this was done to allow the construction of a large apartment development, whose planning was obtained under the Strategic Housing Development process.

This week the developer has announced that the building of apartments there was not financially viable, and a new application would be made to construct an office development instead.

The great switcheroo has been beloved of Irish developers in the past. In all probability there was never any intention to build housing. All that was ever seen here was a space interrupted by the inconvenience of The Sextant Bar being there.

The hollow excuse of lack of viability is but a euphemism. Possible profit from apartments was not seen as being sufficient, the rental price per square metre being seen as being far higher from offices than from apartments.

Developers, we’re told, are risk takers. In this case an innate conservatism seems to have taken hold instead. Because in the past offices have brought a greater return than housing, any risk is thought lessened by seeking the supposed easier return.

This thinking is further embedded by government policies on tax and tax expenditures which promote construction activity for its own sake, rather than help incentivise needed buildings in the most appropriate places.

This has resulted in an imbalance, with a consequent over supply, of particular building developments. Along side the glut of office space that has been developed, there has been a similar pump priming of student accommodation and of hotels.

Many of these developments have been cheaper to build and when built offer the prospect of quicker and higher returns. Meanwhile necessary infrastructure, such as the provision of residential housing, continue to be under supplied, inflating prices which creates further obstacles for those who wish to be housed.

However the market has delivered before, as it is currently structured what it is delivering is the limiting the capacity for the construction of housing, creating other buildings that are not particularly needed.

New office development is in danger of becoming the whitest of elephants. Office buildings already are the most under utilised of buildings. Many being unused during night time hours and during weekends.

In a post COVID world, with a greater level of people working from home, what is the basis for believing that will be a need for greater office capacity? Is it not more likely that there will be greater vacancies in existing office developments?

The Sextant saga highlights so many ways in which our planning and development systems are not fit for purpose. There is the unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of maintaining existing streetscapes. Of being able to work with what exists, to enhance and augment, which should be the approach.

Instead we identify as ‘developers’ those so lacking in imagination, that to plot to remove then replace with what is soulless and is utterly unsustainable, makes them those who determine the future City we live in. We deserve so much better than that.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Pic: JCD

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15 thoughts on “Dan Boyle: The Sextant That Lost Its Way

  1. SB

    Should make them rebuild the Sextant Bar as it was, like they did when Archer’s garage in Dublin was demolished

  2. Mr. T

    Jokes on them – demand for office space is dropping with all the WFH.
    Companies are downsizing office space with hot desking & hybrid working arrangements.

    The real crime here is An Bord Pleanala and SHD bypassing local authorities – the solution is to give more resources to LAs to speed up planning process, instead of bypassing it altogether.

  3. Donald McCarthy

    And the people overseeing all this are the people we must rely on to deal with the existential threat of extinction? WTF? Almost every organization in Ireland has fallen well short of the standards we could reasonably expect them to champion. Equally concerning is the fact that every effort to investigate these failings has fallen well short of the professed standards of those handsomely paid to investigate. So we must investigate the investigators and prepare to investigate the investigating investigators in turn. And all the time shovelling money, much needed elsewhere, into the grasping fists of the greedy. And we feel confident that when the crops fail and the water no longer flows and the sockets are powerless, these same people will come good for us? That, my strange friends, is not confidence. It is hopium writ large and it makes you complicit in, and fully deserving of, your near-term extinction. Sunny today with a 100% chance of annihilation.

  4. Johnny

    Your govt not a developer is one that killed this resi deal along with many,many others planned and pre-funded,what’s your ‘plan’ to replace the capital provided by pre-sales-ask an irish bank haha

  5. Otis Blue

    “Rents required to make the 201-apartment project financially viable would have had to rise an average of 21% from current levels, to as much as €2,800 per month for a two-bed unit, which JCD say “is not sustainable in the Cork market”.

    https://www.irishexaminer.com/property/developmentconstruction/arid-40300916.html

    At a time that Cork residential rents have never been higher – two bed apartments in The Elysian across the road are renting at around €2,300pm – it really begs the question as to how anybody could have thought this project was ever viable.

    Anyway JCD know what they’re about. They’ve done well at adjacent commercial sites in Albert Quay and Penrose Dock. I’m sure that they’ll have their eye on both Amazon and Peloton who are currently believed to be on the lookout for office space in the city to accommodate over 1,500 workers.

    Hopefully, they’ll all have somewhere to live.

    1. Johnny

      Amazon and Google are headquartered west side Manhattan,they could move the dial at higher end rents in Cork by 20-30%,the abrupt ham fisted shutting down,off pre sales as a source capital,has resulted in lots aborted apartment projects,killing the dreams of many irish to get away from their parents and families,live independently.

      At the time it was planned/conceived it was a totally different pre pandemic world,with yank funds in bidding wars for presales,this govt killed that market which may have driven some the original projections.
      The success with prior projects,willing partner with capital ready go,it’s a number reasons but you can’t accuse them of not having b*lls.

      Based on their prior work and apartments will quickly follow a large deal with Amazon or Peleton,it’s looks like a fantastic project for Cork.

      1. Otis Blue

        Originally JCD stated that the rationale for the development was to address concerns expressed by its multinational clients that there was a dearth of suitable residential accommodation available for their employees in the city centre and that this lack of suitable accommodation was compromising the economic development of the city. So what’s changed?

        Btw the last new Cork city centre apartment scheme of scale – the nearby Elysian – was completed as far back as September 2008, the exact month in which the magnitude of the then-looming global economic crash became evident.

        Whatever the real reason, I think it’s a canary in the coal mine.

        1. johnny

          -have not been inside The Elysian,but by all accounts O’Flynn Construction built a great building,if i had guess,i’d bet on a tenant in their pocket, allowing them get capital to build it.

          -pre-sales of rental apartments are part of any fully functioning housing market,as is pre-leasing office buildings.

          -this govt is doomed to failure as it has no long term holistic multi phased plan to tackle irelands real national emergency and it ain’t the flu-its housing or lack of.

  6. Ronan

    Not sure I agree:

    1. Building standards are too high. There’s a reason apartments are not currently viable outside of Dublin. The greens are champions of costly building standards – and rightly so – for energy rating.
    2. Developers build what they can sell – they do not have a social responsibility, as much as successive governments have tried to rely on them to do so. They are free to make their own decisions on what the Cork market demands – it’s not for de peeple to decide what should be put where.
    3. As a follow on to 1 and 2 above, tax incentives are required, or a state building program, if you want to build apartments of this standard for a mix of social and private tenants, but care needs to be taken so this is only applied in specific zones.
    4. What is old, is not necessarily precious. If the Sextant was a historically important building, it should have been listed. Just like, say, you know, the actual listing building which is part of this development.

    The sad reality (and I say this as a proud Corkman) is that there is very little architecture of interest in Cork, and what is there in that area has been preserved, or has appropriate plans:
    1. Old Tramway: Preserved as The National Sculpture Factory
    2. Albert Street Train Station and ticket office – will actually be preserved and renovated in the above scheme
    3. Albert Quay Train Station: Preserved as part of a bigger complex (I think including webworx etc?)
    4. Model School: Now Anglesea St courts complex
    5. Custom House and counting houses: Incorporated in ambitious plans
    6. Navigation House: Facade preserved, unfortunately some old sandstone walls were beyond redemption. Like it or loathe it (I’m on the fence, looks good from within 50m, and bad due to scale from afar), the piece of architectural merit has been preserved.
    – I do have *some* reservation, as I liked the long warehouses, one of which was in the plan at one point.
    7. Horgan’s Quay – various bits of preserved carriage shed and other bits.
    8. Odlum’s – facade is listed

    So there’ll be some more debates around Cork’s industrial and maritime heritage, but a bit of a pub does not qualify in my book for preservation, whilst I’d argue for any of the above.

    The one that I’m torn on is the R&H hall grain silo. I hated it for years, then moved to the area, and now I begrudgingly like it’s brutal appearance. However, I would be ok with a demolition, as neither the commercial nor residential property market in Cork could feasibly sustain it’s incorporation into something else.

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