We need to ensure rezoning frenzy is a thing of the past

The staggering legacy of the insanity that characterised the boom years in Ireland was revealed in figures recently which showed that there is currently enough zoned land in the country to build homes for another three million people. The eagerness with which councillors were prepared to rubber-stamp zoning applications at the behest of landowners and developers in this country is clearly evident. With this massive oversupply in the current stagnant property market, it will be many years - if ever - before anything is built on much of this land. It is estimated that one-third of the impaired property-related loans which Nama will end up with will be greenfield sites, which may effectively be worthless, although this very much depends on their location, among other factors. Nama is only likely to be interested in landbanks which have some prospect of being realised within the next decade, so literally tens of thousands of acres of sites could be left lying idle for decades to come. Unsustainable development is nothing new in the Midlands. Over the years, there has been excessive and unnecessary rezoning of land for housing, much of it in inappropriate locations. In South Roscommon, there was significant land rezoned without proper services and facilities in place, meaning that the State and its servants were playing catch up with the housing developers from day one. There are fears too that this area will soon have inadequate school capacity, despite the fact it has not seen some of the massive population jumps of other parts of the country. Land rezoning is a reserved function of county councillors; in other words, they have the final say on it, and can even go against the advice of officials and planning staff. The rash rezoning decisions made by councillors during the Celtic Tiger years, which are now about to be dropped into the laps of taxpayers, should no longer be possible under new legislation that will impose restrictions on councillors' abilities to zone land if it does not comply with national or regional planning guidelines. The new rules will also allow a local authority to 'dezone' land from residential back to agricultural if it deems it necessary or appropriate. The damage, in many cases, already has been done and, indeed, calls into question Nama being able to attain long-term value on landbanks, many of which are realistically worth possibly one-tenth of what may have been paid for them. The new regulations on rezoning will bring some badly needed joined-up thinking to this debate and will ensure that councillors must in future make development plans that are consistent with national and regional guidelines, which will hopefully mean there will be some coherence on where and why rezonings take place. At the very least, the new legislation should mean that the days of rash, unbridled rezoning of land is at an end.