Property insights with Johnny Gannon,
Fair Deal Property
Walk from Eyre Square out the Headford Road or along the Dublin Road and count the buildings between four and six storeys high. You will not need both hands. Galway is a city of two-storey estates on the edge and a scattering of apartment blocks in the middle, with almost nothing in between. That gap is exactly where the homes we need should be going.
Planners call it the missing middle. Our European neighbours built it as a matter of course. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Lyon: street after street of four, five and six storey apartment buildings, shops at ground level, families above, a tram or a train within walking distance. It is dense enough to pay for good transport and central enough that people want to live there.
Ireland, like Britain and Australia, never got the habit. Our planning system makes it easier to build a housing estate in a peripheral field rather than an apartment building in a zoned urban site. So developers do the rational thing. They go to the field.
Here is the part the public debate keeps missing. Mid-rise is cheap to build. Four to six storeys can go up on a concrete frame, with one lift core and standard fire measures. Go beyond that and costs climb sharply: steel structure, multiple lifts, sprinklers, a different class of fire engineering. High-rise apartments in Ireland are expensive not because developers are greedy but because the building itself demands it. Mid-rise is the sweet spot where the numbers work without heavy subsidy.
I have argued in this column before that the last real bottleneck in Irish housebuilding is finance, and that viability is the lock on the door. Mid-rise is the key. If a scheme can be delivered at a cost buyers and funders will accept, it gets built. If it cannot, it stays on the drawing board no matter how many homes the plan promises.
The State of Victoria in Australia has just shown how to do it. Its new Mid-Rise Code sets out design standards for four to six storey apartment buildings: minimum room and balcony sizes, daylight, access. If your application meets the code, permission is automatic. No discretionary refusal on height or design. No third-party appeal. The Victorian government expects it to cut approval times by about five months.
Think about what that would mean here. A developer with a site on the Tuam Road, or beside the rail line at Oranmore or Athenry, could go to the bank with a planning permission rather than a planning hope. Certainty is worth money. It lowers the cost of finance, which lowers the price of the finished home.
England has gone a similar way. Under its updated planning framework, a scheme within 800 metres of a railway station gets a "default yes" provided it meets a density floor: 45 homes per hectare near frequent services, 35 near less frequent ones. The code intentionally directs development toward the locations with transportation links in place and fast tracks delivery exponentially.
Galway has those locations. Ceannt Station. Oranmore. Athenry. And when the Western Rail Corridor reaches Tuam, we have the chance to build the town's regeneration around its station rather than around its bypass.
So here is my ask. An Irish Mid-Rise Code: compliance-based, automatic permission for four to six storey residential schemes on zoned land within one kilometre of a rail station or high-frequency bus stop. No third-party appeals for code-compliant schemes. Run it for five years with a sunset clause and measure the output.
We do not need to invent anything. Copenhagen built it a century ago. Victoria wrote the rulebook this year. Galway has the sites and the transport. The missing middle remains for now but it's surely time to fill the gap.
Johnny Gannon is the founder of Fair Deal Property, Auctioneers & Estate Agents, Galway. For advice on buying, selling or developing, call 091 394593 or
visit www.fairdealproperty.ie
