infrastructure and construction report
Emerging trends in infrastructure
Accelerating the delivery of new affordable homes John Coleman, Chief Executive of the Land Development Agency (LDA), speaks to eolas about the LDA’s growth, its plans for 2022 and the hopes of building over 5,000 new affordable and cost rental homes under Project Tosaigh. Coleman begins by tracking the progress of the LDA since its foundation on an interim basis in 2018: “We started off with no staff, no office, no infrastructure, and we have built a reasonably good platform now where we have advanced to 60 staff, and we have advanced sites through the various stages of the development process with the aim of starting construction for 862 homes in 2022.” With a broader portfolio of roughly 5,000 homes, the LDA are advancing their process on state and local authority lands in partnership with local authorities. They have also targeted a separate 5,000 homes through Project Tosaigh, which “expands and accelerates our ambitions in the affordable space”, Coleman says. “We have increased the site portfolio significantly; at launch we had promises of sites that could yield around 3,000 homes, and between Project Tosaigh, 38
our current developments and land transfers under Housing for All (HfA), we think that site capacity is now around 25,000,” Coleman says. “The LDA was set up in the first place as a land assembler longer-term and between HfA land transfer announcements and active areas, which are focused on design, master planning and problem solving around infrastructure, we have three strategic areas in our portfolio: Limerick Colbert Station, Sandy Road in Galway, and the Digital Hub in Dublin, with more planned in the future.” In the short term, the LDA is focused on the delivery of affordable and cost rental housing on state lands; their longer-term plans consist of land assembly and the coherent delivery of larger scale strategic areas for sustainable development and regeneration. Coleman details their 2022 plans, where it is hoped that two development projects will progress to site, and five planning
