The concerns expressed this week by Dublin City Council regarding two proposed student accommodation developments near the Dublin Institute of Technology’s (DIT) Grangegorman campus are disappointing and troubling for students. The council seems less than enthusiastic about two planned developments on Prussia St and the North Circular Road which would house between them almost 1,000 students. A local authority in the midst of a housing crisis that is severely restricting the ability of students, and indeed a significant proportion of the population, from securing stable housing should welcome two tangible developments that could deal with this. It is very difficult to understand why it does not.
However, it is certainly not the case that all of the objections from city planners should be dismissed out of hand. Preserving the architecture and heritage of the city are legitimate reasons for the council to invoke as they call for a redesign of proposed developments that they deem too large or too obtrusive. One might question the extent to which the local authority strikes a reasonable balance between these legitimate concerns and acknowledging the gravity of the housing crisis, as did this paper when similar adjustments were prescribed for Trinity’s planned redevelopment of Oisín House.
Worryingly, however, the council’s disfavour extended beyond the architectural details of the proposed sites to the risk of an “overconcentration of student accommodation” – a fear reportedly shared by local residents, leading them to request justification from the private developers as to why the developments needed to be so big and why they had chosen to build student accommodation specifically. These questions might have been more pertinent if they had not been put to companies building student accommodation adjacent to a campus where more than 20,000 students will be studying within three years.
The attitudes of the Dublin City Council and local residents make students sound like some alien predatory species introduced to disturb the fragile ecosystem of a peaceful desert island. It is not entirely clear that this the case. Civilisation has not quite yet come tumbling down in Maynooth, where the 12,000 students who study there each day almost equal the local population.
A less ardent criticism, however, might be that their approach is one that is normally only applied to wind turbines – things we might like to have in theory, especially the general economic benefits associated with them, but so long as they are far, far away and have no chance of disturbing us.
Wanting students to have places to live in the abstract but objecting when they are found nearby is as hypocritical as it is ineffective in solving Dublin’s housing crisis.
