Dublin City Council is to create a new town in Cherry Orchard as part of a €2 billion plan, which includes 5,000 houses, a town centre and train station. The plan, which will see the development of two 25-acre sites, will link in with the partially completed Park West industrial, commercial and residential complex. Liam Reid reports.
According to council officials 30 per cent of the new homes will be affordable housing selling for about €184,000 for a three-bed townhouse. However, the council has ruled out any social housing because of the existing council housing in the area.
Cherry Orchard has previously been known for high levels of deprivation and at present consists mainly of large council estates and light industrial areas.
The development will centre on the existing Park West site and an adjacent 25-acre site owned by the council, which between them will have more than 2,300 housing units.
These two areas will include a railway station and town plaza, which is to begin construction next year. The plaza and station are being built by Harcourt Developments, the company behind the Park West site, but 40 per cent of the 6 million cost is being funded by Dublin City Council. The station, on the Kildare suburban Arrow service, is being developed in co-operation with Iarnród Éireann.
The city council is currently in the process of identifying a preferred bidder out of six tenders for its existing site.
When the project is completed, it will include 1,500 housing units, new civic plazas and open spaces, a town centre including landmark buildings and commercial and retail outlets.
The council is also planning for a large hotel in the new town centre and a major supermarket.
It is also in the final stages of purchasing more than 25 acres from the Eastern Regional Health Authority close to the Cherry Orchard Hospital site, where it hopes to develop at least 1,500 housing units.
As with all major developments by the city council in recent years, it will be financed and built by private firms. The overall investment is expected to exceed 2 billion by the time the development is finished.
The new projects will link with a newly completed 376-unit residential development at Cedar Brook and the 700 housing units planned for Park West.
Although the Park West site is already substantially built on, construction at the two city council sites is not expected to get under way before 2006 at the earliest.
Mr Michael Stubbs, Dublin City Council's south-central area manager, said that when all developments were completed, there would be 5,000 houses and apartments in the new town centre. The development was the largest housing and town-centre project undertaken by the city council since the Ballymun regeneration project, he said.
Announcing the development, the Dublin city manager, Mr John Fitzgerald, said it was part of the council's overall plan to ensure that an average of 6,000 new housing units are completed in the city council area each year.
"This site is only four to five miles from the city centre. Six years ago it was a wasteland," he said.
The original idea for the scheme arose in the late 1990s during the housing crisis in Dublin, when the Government was trying to identify sites which would be suitable for high-density housing developments.
Because of the price of land, high-density projects like this are now possible. "We are now building on average between 40 and 50 housing units per acre of land, whereas, even in the late 1990s, we were building just 15 to 16 per acre," Mr Fitzgerald said.
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