In a leaflet on housing I identified ‘land use policies’ as one of the key factors in the housing crisis. Some people may think I was ‘making this up’. I wasn’t. Some people may have thought I was exaggerating, but it would be hard to overestimate the impact these policies have — not only on people searching for a home or place to stay — but on society in other ways also.
Some people may simply have been uncertain what exactly these ‘policies’ I’m referring to actually are. So I have written this article to make it clearer.
Background — The ‘environmental’ movement
Although many people are skeptical of climate change dogma, not so many (in Ireland at least) have identified how it is directly responsible — at least in part — for the housing crisis. (Many in the ‘freedom movement’ blame the crisis on immigration, for example.)
The so-called ‘environmental’ movement is dominated now by people who care considerably more for the ‘environment’ than for humans; there is a distinctly anti-human quality or aspect to a lot of their campaigns and policies. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their concern for the ‘environment’; I doubt their concern for humans. Specifically, I wonder if they have any.
In any case, these policies (regarding land use, zoning, etc.) are directly related to the housing shortage. For this reason, if for no other, I believe they need careful scrutiny.
Environmental policies and land use
Land use and zoning in County Waterford
The land use policies for Waterford City and County are laid out in considerable detail in the ‘Waterford City & County Development Plan 2022-2028’. This can be read online at https://waterfordcouncil.ie/documents/development-plan-2022-2028/ .
Housing development in the ‘open countryside’, under this scheme, is explicity discouraged. Instead, new residential developments outside of cities and towns will be mostly limited to ‘clustered housing in Rural Settlement Nodes’ (Section 7.11.1).
Although the authors suggest that the open countryside should be ‘a living and lived-in landscape’, their vision is that the habitants will mainly be birds and animals — rather than humans. For they explicit state their envisaged plan for the open countryside — that it will be mainly allocated for ‘agriculture, forestry, tourism and rural enterprise’. So, aside from a perfunctory presence of ‘rural enterprise’ and the occasional ‘tourist’, it’s clear that they want as little ‘human interference’ in the open countryside as possible.
And, indeed, their criteria for new residential development applications make this clear. This criteria — that an applicant must have been resident in the area (within approx. 10 km of their building location) for a period of roughly seven years or more — would make it effectively impossible for most people to ever establish a home in the countryside.
Very little ‘residential’ zoning
Waterford County has an area of approximately 1850 km2 — or approximately 470000 acres.
The Waterford Development Plan — according to its zoning maps — designates approximately 10 km2 for residential purposes — or only 1 in every 200 acres (approximately).[1]
Reading between the lines
Let’s not miss the wood for the trees, or split hairs over the precise details of these plans and policies. Reading between the lines, one gets a distinct impression that the authors (of, e.g., the Waterford Development Plan) are little concerned with the impact these policies will have on the inhabitants of the affected areas.
A reasonable takeaway is that the authors are more concerned with ‘population targets’ and ‘settlement topologies’, etc. than the potential hardships these policies might cause for people who aspire to own a home — which includes, well, almost everyone.
I am willing to accept that these policymakers (or at least some of them) are earnest in their care for their environment. I just don’t see much indication that they care about people.
Don’t they know what they’re doing?
These plans and policies are essentially an exercise in social engineering. Is it appropriate in this case — given the degree of hardship and suffering these policies are causing (by dramatically increasing the contention for land) — to throw one’s hands up in the air and say: ‘But they must know what they are doing’?
I don’t believe it is appropriate.
But what about the environment?
Ideally communities would be able to implement their own ‘social housing’ solutions. But the various ‘zoning’ decisions and planning regulations in effect throughout the country — as well as pressure from ‘environmental’ groups — make this nigh impossible.
I’m not arguing that no effort whatsoever should be made to set aside certain land areas for specific uses (i.e. zoning) — e.g. sports, recreation, public parks, manufacturing, etc. I’m not arguing that people skip the environmental assessments before building. And I’m not at all suggesting that aspiring builders or home-owners should ignore the potential aesthetic impact their building project could have — on their village, town, or neighbour.
I am, however, arguing that these considerations are being ‘blown out of proportion’. These policies — from my perspective — go significantly beyond reasonable considerations such as impact on wildlife. The authors of the Waterford Development Plan openly state, for example, that ‘population targets’ have been set — on a national, county and even town and village level. So there is more at play here than mere ‘concern for the environment’. As intimated above, this is (at least in part) about population control and social engineering.
I refuse to accept that environmental goals need to or should be incompatible with human welfare — or indeed flourishing. But when the environmental goals — and land-use policies and settlement typologies and population targets — are set by deluded eugenicists (as these policies seem to be) then there is a conflict between the two concerns (environmental protection on the one hand and human habitation, recreation and industry on the other).
That’s not to imply we don’t have a ‘way to go’ in our behaviour as it relates to environmental impact. Some of our practices are more-or-less abominable. But effectively banishing people from access to the country’s natural resources (including land) is hardly the answer, is it? The people drafting and implementing these policies have no right to do that.
Takeaway and further questions
Some environmentalists — as well as ‘NIMBYs’ — sometimes have valid concerns.[2] But their dogmatism and unwillingness to seek compromise or mutually satisfactory solutions means that the rest of us are, ultimately, held hostage.
Many so-called ‘environmentalists’ oppose human habitation, well, almost anywhere. As if humans — by their very breathing, eating, sleeping, working, exercising, playing, etc. — pose an imminent threat to ‘biodiversity’, to the water table, to nature itself.
What are these planning regulations and land use policies, if not an attempt to metaphorically strangle people? Or at least herd them — like livestock — in to predefined ‘settlements’?
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