Blog 20_ In the Mews

"I think your Housing plans are brillant", writes one person but adds that studio apartments won't suit him; he needs something bigger for his family. "Do you have any other ideas that might help people in my situation"?

Building studio apartments will indirectly help everyone who wants to purchase a home. It will reduce the competition for homes built under the Housing For All (HFA) plan. Those for whom a studio apartment, close to all services and facilities, is adequate eg a single person, two people or even two people and a child will no longer be in the market for a home.

The key thing is not to suggest anything that would interfere with HFA. That plan has to do the state's heavy lifting for a wide variety of homes including social homes, cost rental, affordable purchase, first home scheme etc.

There is one area where I could suggest a new policy and that relates to mews houses. A mews house, or a converted mews, is a house built at the end of the garden of a main residence which opens out onto a laneway, often a quite large laneway. Sometimes this would be on the site of an old disused stables or garage, hence "converted mews". These potential mews homes would have all the necessary infrastructure close by. Also as individual homes, they are generally built by small local construction firms and would not impact the manpower available to the much larger HFA building companies.

It has been estimated that there is capacity for building up to 12,000 new mews houses in this way in our main cities: Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway etc. How to unlock this potential? Some incentives will be required for owners of the main residences.

One suggestion is to create an architectural and structural envelope, say max 2 floors, 3 beds etc. If the design stays inside that envelope, then the building of the mews house should be planning exempt so, no planning permission required. A further incentive for the owner would be to allow a tax credit for capital gains tax, if the mews is sold to an owner occupier.

Of course in this case, there would be no fixed price as the price would be determined by the market. However this could bring an additional 12,000 homes to the market for owner occupiers over the next five years, all within the city boundaries and close to existing services and facilities. Let's do it.