Limerick architect: We need to learn to share communal spaces in Ireland

People in Ireland need to consider sharing more communal space and embrace multi-generational living, a local authority architect has said.

Limerick City and County Council senior executive architect Mick Forde Bradley, who lived in Denmark for 15 years before moving back to Ireland two years ago, said more sharing of living spaces needs to happen in Ireland as it prepares for a surge in population growth over the next 20 years.

Mr Forde Bradley, who has responsibility for cost rental and affordable purchase at the council, is one of a number of speakers who will be addressing the Irish Council for Social Housing’s National Social Housing Conference in Sligo.

Speaking to the PA news agency ahead of the start of the two-day event on Wednesday, Mr Forde Bradley said that the average floor area of an apartment in Denmark is around four metres squared smaller than in Ireland, and that Irish units in general are smaller compared to the rest of Europe.

“In general, we’re like four metres squared above Denmark, and we’d be much bigger than anything in Italy or Spain. So the narrative of us having small housing units is not correct. We have large units compared to the rest of Europe.”

Mr Forde Bradley said that each unit in a Denmark complex would “find another four to six metres squared to give towards communal areas”, and said that people in Ireland “need to learn to share”.

“In 50 years’ time, you’ll have people looking back at single people living in four-bedroom houses out in the countryside, and they’ll ask themselves, ‘How in the name of God was that person living alone in 160 metres squared?’ It’d be like a completely different way of looking at property.

“And for Irish people, that’s really hard to get your head around because we are also built into the idea of owning your own property.”

Noting that Denmark is an interesting example as it’s “always about 10 years ahead of us”, he points out that multi-generational living in Denmark sprung up demand from older citizens around five years ago.

“My point is, if you can show multi-generational living in a different way, in a smaller amount of space, with a more exciting way of living, people will consider moving from houses out in the countryside to something different,” he told PA.

“So in Denmark, the older generation owned property, of course, the 65-80 year olds, and they wanted to downsize and find a more comfortable way of living.

“And that spawned a whole type of senior living development now in Denmark, and is basically seeing the ‘grey gold’ move from existing property into smaller downsizing, often rental accommodation, because they don’t want to go back into longer-term purchases again.”

He said that renting is popular in the Nordic country because people have security of tenure.

“Only 20% of people in Copenhagen own their space, 80% are renting, and the reason they rent is because they have long-term tenure security. So if you rent an apartment in Denmark, and you’ve rented there for longer than two years, you can’t be kicked out.”

Mr Forde Bradley said that Denmark offers a look at what could have been the case if Ireland had taken a different path decades ago when social housing provision slowed down.

“The Danes kept building their social affordable, meaning that they now have something like 25-30% of their housing stock is actually social affordable, and here in Ireland 10% is social and we have almost nothing affordable.

“And so, what’s kind of cool about looking at the Danish system is that it’s like what would have happened if we just kept building.”

Another speaker at the social housing conference, Eduardo Gonzalez de Molina, a policy consultant at the Barcelona City Council Housing Department, argued in a recent blog that the city had moved from “a market-fixing to a market-shaping approach” in order to create an affordable housing market.

The conference comes as the Government comes under pressure over its Housing for All plan amid record homeless figures, high house prices and increasing rents.