Zoning out: Shortage of land available for housing at crux of crisis, developers warn

What’s keeping more houses from being built? Builders say there’s a shortage of land, with some locations even being dezoned for housing. National policy calls for compact urban growth, but now the scarcity of sites is driving up land prices, while construction costs are soaring

Developers are faced with their lands being dezoned or are struggling to find new sites to develop. The problem has come at a time when the country needs to build between 300,000 to 400,000 homes in the space of a decade. Picture: Maura Hickey

Sean Reilly has decades of experience building houses in Ireland. But he has a problem. He’s running out of land, specifically land he can build on.

“All the publicity is about the crisis in planning and judicial reviews, and absolutely there are problems in planning, but there's another crisis that hasn't hit yet,” Reilly said. “It's the scarcity of the raw material, which is the land.”

Reilly is executive chairman of McGarrell Reilly, which has ...