Ms Orla Hegarty:

People have confused high density and sustainable density. Much of the new development has gone to the other extreme. People have also confused height with density. You do not need height for a sustainable density. Prior to the deregulation, Dublin, for example, had between six and nine storeys permitted in most of the city, which is probably about the right range for liveability and optimising construction costs. At those kinds of densities, you can phase a development more easily, build in slices and occupy the building. A difficulty with the very dense new SHDs is they are incredibly difficult to finance because they cannot be phased. By removing stairs and lifts, it makes it very difficult to phase the development. That means hundreds, notionally, of complete ready-to-occupy units that cannot be occupied until the rest of the building is finished. The developer then has to carry the finance costs for much longer for all of those units. All these things, rather than reducing size and cost, were done simplistically and have added to cost and made development more risky on those sites.