The collapse of European housing delivery
PROPERTY
Property Insights by Johnny Gannon, Fair Deal Property
We are in the midst of a pan-European housing crisis. Europe is building at roughly half the rate it managed at its 20th century peak, despite a population base that has grown by around 25 per cent since then.
This is a continent that rebuilt entire cities from rubble after two World Wars, that housed a baby boom and connected whole regions with roads, rail and power. Today, with more people, more capital and far better technology than ever before, it delivers half the output.
The reasons are complex, but a recent policy paper from Progress Ireland offers at least part of the answer. If any business halved its output while its customer base grew, we would call it a crisis of management. Yet in housing and infrastructure, we have somehow accepted it as the natural order of things. It is not. It is the predictable result of rules that ask every builder to prove the unprovable, and the report is blunt about where much of the problem lies: EU directives on habitats, birds, and environmental assessment that force individual applicants to answer strategic questions no single developer could ever resolve.
The Galway Ring Road, 25 years in the making is a symbolic representation of this new age paralysis. Here in Tuam, none of this is abstract. Families compete for a modest supply of second-hand homes while serviced and zoned land, ready to take new housing, sits idle around the town. In my own work appraising sites across Galway, I regularly see schemes that make sense on paper become marginal once regulatory cost and delays are factored in.
Each year of delay has a human dimension, accelerating costs beyond the affordability of would-be first-time buyers. Encouragingly, the remedies proposed are practical rather than radical. Environmental questions would be answered once, thoroughly, at the plan-making stage, with a proportionate standard of evidence for individual projects thereafter. Nobody is arguing for weaker protection of nature.
The argument is for protecting it efficiently, so good projects can proceed with certainty rather than drift for years. With Ireland holding the EU Council Presidency, our government is well placed to bring these ideas to Brussels.
If Europe returned to even three-quarters of its former building rate, towns like Tuam, where demand is proven and land is available, would be first to feel the benefit. That is a prize worth pursuing, calmly and persistently.
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