Family-sized apartments

Sir, – Apparently, in the future, people are going to be required to live in apartments, in order to increase the population density of urban areas.

As people mature and want to start families, they will need bigger dwellings than studio or one- bed apartments to live in.

Many will also want to continue living in the area they have been living in, but there will be a shortage of family-sized apartments to buy, if the national planning regulator gets its way.

Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council has put a requirement of 40 per cent of apartments to be three-bed family sized, in order to ensure there will be enough supply for families as they grow.

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Allowing developers to only develop small apartments is going to create the same monoculture of dwelling types and associated problems which the three-bed semi-only housing estate created in the past – a lack of appropriate housing for all family sizes.

I suspect the move to strike out the Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council requirement has more to do with pressure from developers than proper planning development. –Yours, etc,

DAVID DORAN,

Bagenalstown,

Co Carlow.