A sold-out city? The fight to save Dublin’s nightlife

https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/activism-2/a-sold-out-city-the-fight-to-save-dublins-nightlife/

by coffeedrop • 7 years ago

90 107 7 years ago

Macha• 7 years ago

Dublin has been having a bit of a boom (of which tech is a major driver) in the last decade, but this just feels like another symptom of the city which is not allowed to build denser or to sprawl with the result being anything less profitable in terms of land value is getting pushed out of the city (including many families who have lived their behind) while rents reach some of the highest levels in Europe

CydeWeys4• 7 years ago

Seriously. And when space is at such a premium, and it's possible to build up as much as demand warrants, why exactly should nightclubs be prioritized over, say, people's housing? Perhaps the fact that they're diminishing in number reflects the simple fact that housing is a better (and more economic) use of limited space?

It sounds like they're not allowing enough construction to meet demand, and then being shocked when the obvious outcome (prioritization of some uses) occurs.

jwagenet• 7 years ago

Why can't a nightclub be included as part of "first floor" commercial/retail space that can be found in many cities? You have the best of both worlds, a mid/high rise with housing and close proximity to retail and entertainment spaces. Sure, clubs have noise and people issues, but these can be designed around for noise abatement and traffic control or put them underground. Bars have these issues too.

Just because land owners can make more from developing housing in the modern urbanization doesn't mean commercial retail/art/dining/entertainment spaces should be pushed out, otherwise the declining proximity benefits of urbanization lose their appeal.

imgabe3• 7 years ago

The existence of things like nightclubs is a reason there is demand for the housing. A city with only housing is not one that anyone would want to live in.

zerogvt• 7 years ago

It's not housing though. It's hotels - quite different. Rents have been climbing up for the past years (it's now worse than London or Munich) and they don't seem to slow down. Tech boom (low taxation on tech firms), Brexit and AirBnB are the main drivers. People are coming in (quite often with fat paychecks) but few new apartments/houses are being build. New hotels will compete w/ AirBnB but will do little to alleviate the housing crisis(1).

1. It has been publicly recognized as such for quite long now. Crisis meaning that lower income families are unable to compete in this market (i.e. evictions and such). Also this is a hindrance to further economic development (who's going to work on all these new jobs when s/he'll have trouble making ends meet?). You get the idea.

dajohnson892• 7 years ago

Why isn't the city allowed to be denser?

scarejunba• 7 years ago

Same as anywhere else. The locals don’t want that to happen. Unfortunately, other people want to live there too, and there’s a market for housing so it has the obvious effect.

lapnitnelav2• 7 years ago

NIMBYers mostly.

There's an awful lot of urban sprawl because of those archaic rules and you add to that a pretty terrible public transport by Western Europe standards. Dublin is pretty terrible place to live in if you're not wealthy.

Any attempt to improve both situations are thwarted by aforementioned NIMBY folks which are only looking out for themselves, among them the people in power.[0]

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times...

fbonetti• 7 years ago

Same as any other city: zoning. People want to live in cities and local governments won't allow developers to build more housing to accommodate them. The rare scraps of land that are zoned properly for high density are developed into luxury housing.

wheybags• 7 years ago

Partially because people don't want it to be, too. Irish people have an obsession with land, and see any dwelling that isn't at least a semidetached house with a back garden as a "temporary space" for students and unmarried young couples. We just don't like apartments.

dubliner90393• 7 years ago

Pure speculation. Like in many other cities the density is limited, often with silly excuses, in order to drive up the market.

Home owners, including large financial groups, sustain this policy.

Animats• 7 years ago

The kind of low-end large space nightlife the author wants requires an abandoned warehouse district. SF SOMA used to be like that. Either a more productive use for the land is found, as in SF, or everybody young leaves, as in Detroit or the Cleveland Flats.

Dublin isn't cramped by geography. Five miles west of downtown is farmland.

CydeWeys4• 7 years ago

Yeah. Those kinds of venues are going strong here in Williamsburg and Bushwick, in the numerous formerly industrial areas that are being re-colonized. And given the sheer noise and foot traffic of those venues, being out of the way is a good thing.

lucideer4• 7 years ago

There are so many commenters here repeating this mantra "just build higher, just build denser", with seemingly no grip of facts about property in Dublin.

There's no restrictions on height nor density in the Docklands area of Dublin: an area within walking distance of the centre of the city, and with a good regular tram link, that is mostly vacant. Similarly, many areas on major tram routes are not so restricted, such as Sandyford and Cherrywood (these three areas, along with East Point, also happen to be where much of the tech boom is focused). So your denser/higher suggestion is being done and is having no affect—residential rents in these areas are the highest in the city, and much of the units available are left empty as a result.

Meanwhile, in terms of actual supply, even outside of those areas, Dublin has an estimated 40000 vacant residential units, and plenty of vacant commercial units on top of that.

The primary reason for this is that rent prices are not demand-based as much property is financialised—rent isn't a driver for owners, and there are little to no penalties for lack of tenancy, as other cities have.

agent008t4• 7 years ago

Why would the property owners rather have the units sit empty than rent them out at market rates?

q3k3• 7 years ago

The Docklands are a _tiny_ area, and all the development I've seen there focuses on high-end apartment complexes that most people just won't be able to afford - including a lot of the people working at Google, Facebook and Amazon offices nearby that the developers are seemingly targeting.

And it's not like they're actually building tall there. 12 stories? 15 stories?

throwaway32111• 7 years ago

There's no restrictions on height nor density in the Docklands area of Dublin

That's a tiny area compared to the demand for housing.

your denser/higher suggestion is being done and is having no affect

Nonsense. Dublin has a very low density compared to any other European city. It's almost rural.

Dublin has an estimated 40000 vacant residential units

...which is clearly not enough to lower rents given the 1347359 inhabitants in the metro area.

The primary reason for this is that rent prices are not demand-based as much property is financialised—rent isn't a driver for owners, and there are little to no penalties for lack of tenancy, as other cities have.

True. But investors cannot buy unlimited amounts of property. Increasing supply of cheap and good quality (for a change) apartments would obviously help.

CalRobert3• 7 years ago

Indeed. If you like ~60% of SF rents with ~39% of SF pay it's the city for you.

I still like it here, but I have a flat that I got crazy cheap in 2013 and is rent controlled (incidentally, a horrifically stupid policy enacted _especially_ badly here, making the housing crisis even worse). I also just got a remote job and bought a house in Offaly.

I used to encourage people to come to Dublin because it offered better QOL than the bay (I like not being annoyed on weekends and holidays, and that even my non-tech-worker wife gets a month off a year by law) but I really can't any more unless your housing is arranged or you have a fantastic (California-level) offer

CalRobert3• 7 years ago

Eh, I meant ~30%. 39% would be rather specific.

dubliner90393• 7 years ago

is not allowed to build denser or to sprawl

Don't confuse density with its opposite, sprawling. Irish and british cities often have large, low density, horrible sprawls.

maleno2• 7 years ago

There's nothing at all stopping Dublin from being much more dense than it is, and there's no need whatsoever to build high to do it.

Huge gains could be made by bringing more 'above the shop' units into use. Vacancy and dereliction are massive issues, both in the city centre and further out - tackling that through vacant site levies or compulsory purchase orders would be huge. Regulating the abuse of AirBnB could bring a few thousand rental units in the city back into long-term use practically overnight.

As far as building new stock goes, everything is too expensive because land is too expensive. Development land around the city has been stockpiled and hoarded for decades, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices. It's basically impossible to make a profit on reasonably dense, reasonably priced, two or three bed apartment schemes in Dublin. The SCSI and PII have good reports on this if you want to look them up. It's nearly always more profitable (and easier) to just sit on the land rather than actually develop it. The reason all the nightclubs are being replaced by hotels is a result of this: hotels are a lot more commercially viable than almost any other form of development right now. (Hotel beds in Dublin had over 90% occupancy rates last summer - they're bursting and demand is massive.)

The majority of new residential building happens in the outer suburbs and commuter belt, from Lucan to Navan. Just 31 (!!!) new homes were built in Dublin 1 (the very centre of the city) in 2018.

Apartments made up just 13% of new builds in the state last year. The apartments we do build are, on average, smaller, darker, less well serviced, and more expensive than almost any other European city. The apartments built between 1995 and 2008 are riddled with issues, from fire safety to damp to electrics. I think that accounts for a lot of Irish people's apparent antipathy towards apartment living, much more than any nonsense about an inherent desire for a semi-d with a garden.

Rents are expensive because of an increase in the numbers renting (doubled in last decade); because the rent-certainty regulation is weak or non-existent; because tenure security does not exist; because build-to-rent is expensive to develop; because REITs and larger commercial landlords are soaking up all supply and charging as much as they can. Take your pick. It's a mess.

Sorry to go on, but I just finished a six-month deep dive on the reasons behind the housing crisis in Dublin and there is just so much misinformation out there, it's frustrating.

P.S. In case anyone wants to hear more, I made a four-episode podcast series about this, the final episode of which just went up today:

www.dublininquirer.com/2019/02/27/supply-demand-a-podcast-about-dublin-s-housing-crisis-episode-4

CalChris• 7 years ago

In SF, that happened to Cocomos. It was a great club that was closed and sold for development. That’s understandable but it brings to mind the Yogi Berra quote, Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

narrator• 7 years ago

Tech workers move into a city and drive up rents. They complain about lack of density driving rents up. Meanwhile, New York and Chicago are not really tech hubs, even though they have dense downtowns. Hong Kong should be the center of the tech universe with all that density, but alas it is not. Maybe the thing that makes tech workers want to live and work somewhere is lack of density?

alexgmcm• 7 years ago

Given many tech workers can work remotely it seems bizarre that we even need to live in city centres.

But alas, businesses still want everyone in the office (often all the time as well).

duggan• 7 years ago

I mean, a convenient commute is nice, but so is access to cinemas, museums, restaurants, bars, etc.

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

Still not as good as 100% collocated teams

kd0amg• 7 years ago

Maybe the thing that makes tech workers want to live and work somewhere is lack of density?

The vast majority of non-dense areas have much less of a tech scene than New York and Chicao. I would expect that what draws tech workers is career opportunity more than high or low density and that density is more driven by how municipal government responds to the changing local job market.

hydrox24• 7 years ago

I understand the opening sentence is a rhetorical flourish... but it is also astoundingly wrong.

This year, on Imbolc – a Gaelic tradition that sees Ireland celebrate the patron saint Brigid, a Celtic goddess...

Imbolc is a celebration of the Goddess Brigid, which very few Irish celebrate. The feast day for Saint Brigid is on the same day, and is celebrated more widely. While she was possibly a Christianised version of the goddess, she is probably a real person who was later given the characteristics of the Goddess by her hagiographers and by confused lay people. Apparently the tradition continues.

...who allegedly had 7th-century lesbian romances and carried out the first abortion on the island...

I don't think that the 'allegedly' is a strong enough qualifier here. It's a relatively modern interpretation of a piece of hagiography (rather than a text considered to be more historical). Historically, neither has been asserted by the Catholic church or by scholars generally.

And finally... The goddess clearly existed much earlier than the 7th century, so assuming they're talking about the saint... she lived from the middle of the fifth century to the first part of the sixth. The book about her was written in the 7th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid_of_Kildare

AlexTWithBeard• 7 years ago

So... the opening paragraph contains two factual mistakes and one politically (but not factually) correct statement.

But I'm sure they've done the research and checked their data for the rest of the article.

xkcd-sucks• 7 years ago

Your comment highlighted the similarity between religion moving into new places and crossover [fan]fiction. It's neat how things develop

purplezooey• 7 years ago

79 hotels. Wish we could build like that in the bay area.

JansjoFromIkea• 7 years ago

The reason I didn't even consider Dublin over London or another major European had little to do with the rent prices as it had to do public transportation.

Being dependent on mainly in Dublin means you'll likely want to restrict yourself to areas which can get you to your workplace with zero connections (and everyone else who works in your general area will probably feel the same). Being an especially wet country (nowhere near as bad as the west of Ireland, mind), means even this is gonna be an utter misery many mornings and evenings. As far as nightlife is concerned, with a better public transportation system you can get away for ages by just continuing to push stuff further out.

In London I've the option if I want to live pretty far out (but still on a line that stops near my office) and live alone for not a whole lot more (if anything) than I'd pay to live within walking distance and share. Hardly anyone I know on my pay level in Dublin could even consider living alone, which puts even further pressure on living as near to work as possible.

q3k3• 7 years ago

I've lived in Dublin for two and a half years years. I like to tell about its public transport to people who complain they have it bad in their city (not that it's an excuse, it's just extremely entertaining to see their reaction):

- There's one suburban train service (DART) that kinda goes through the centre and then just takes you to suburbs. It's like an S-Bahn except it doesn't stop anywhere useful in the city itself. Unless you live in one of the expensive suburbs it takes you to, you can basically forget about it. I've only used it to get out of the city for hikes.

- There's two tram lines, that until a year ago didn't even cross. Oh, and the trams are _extremely_ slow because they have barely any dedicated lanes in the centre, instead sharing the street with the rest of the road traffic. Even when they are on dedicated tracks, they're still absurdly slow for some reason (in comparison to all other tram systems I've used elsewhere).

- There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable. They have no timetable, instead they leave their terminus at some fixed time and then go as fast or as slow as they can, sometimes skipping stops if the traffic is bad. [1] Since this means you basically cannot make distributed, reliable connections between buses, they maximize their usefulness by running most of them through a single choke point in the city centre, where it can take up to 30 minutes to go through. Each line has a ton of stops, and every time passengers get on the bus, they go single-file through the driver that asks for the target stop and charges their pre-paid card accordingly (or you can go through a separate card reader that just charges you a daily flat rate, but that doesn't make sense if you're not commuting a long distance that day).

And that's it. Nothing else. Unless you're lucky enough to be on the _two_ tram lines or _one_ commuter train, you're stuck with shitty, expensive buses. Don't move to Dublin.

[1] - There is real-time bus tracking, but this doesn't help you to make a connection, just to leave home/work and not have to stand in the rain for too long. Just hope you bus doesn't get stuck in traffic along the way.

purple_ducks3• 7 years ago

You left out the atrocious(in the few places it exists) cycling infrastructure.

anjc2• 7 years ago

There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable

Ireland didn't invent these buses just to annoy you, the Volvo buses used in Dublin are used worldwide, including London and Berlin. They're as modern as you can get.

CalRobert3• 7 years ago

Everything you wrote is correct. And yet it's vastly superior to what I had living in LA.

BTW, if you want to help improve bike infra please consider asking your employer to support https://dublin.cyclingworks.org/ - we're trying to pressure Shane Ross to take cycling seriously.

asymmetric• 7 years ago

Meanwhile in Berlin: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/berlin-germany-housin...

secfirstmd2• 7 years ago

As an aside. Great to see so many HN readers from Dublin. We should totally do a Meetup at some stage. Check my bio if you are interested!

throwaway293194• 7 years ago

Dublin has plenty of shitty meetups. I wonder if an HN one would be above or below the average.

secfirstmd2• 7 years ago

Fair point.

A sold-out city? The fight to save Dublin’s nightlife

Related Stories