The Green Party has called for a rewriting of residential guidelines as it emerges that a developer is seeking permission for a development which proposes that 42 bedrooms will share one kitchen.The proposal is located in Dún Laoghaire and has been submitted to Bord Pleanála as a Strategic Housing Development.Green Party councillor and European elections candidate Ciarán Cuffe said:“The proposal for forty-two bedrooms sharing one kitchen is Dickensian in nature. It provides an insight into the prospect of a dystopian housing market driven by profit and greed. I suspect that even the communal living apartments of Soviet Russia had more generous spatial standards than are apparent in this Planning application.“Minister Murphy’s ‘Sustainable Urban Housing: Design Standards for New Apartments’ guidelines are a classic example of light-touch regulation and they need to change. It allows developers to propose poor quality developments. The regulations state: ‘the nature and extent of the resident services and amenities may be agreed by the project developer and the planning authority having regard to the scale, intended location and market for the proposed development’.“If permission is granted for this development it will result in a slowing down of provision of adequately sized homes, as super-profits will be made from these shoebox units.“We are in a housing crisis. We need to build homes of a decent standard. If elected to the European Parliament I will work to deliver a housing package from Europe that could assist in tackling the housing crisis in cities around the Union. Young people cannot afford to buy or rent and this needs to change. Our Government and the European Union must prioritise the construction of cost-rental housing.”NoteDetails of the proposal are available on http://bartraeblanashd.comCouncillor Cuffe’s submission to An Bord Pleanála is available here: http://bit.ly/2VUK07mIssued and uploaded 8th May 2019