A Dublin-based tech entrepreneur builds a YIMBY-ish media platform

About three weeks ago, a YouTube channel called Polysee published a video on why an effort to build 52 apartments on a vacant site in Smithfield stalled out.

The case “sheds a light on why the capital has such a stubborn housing shortage”, says the narrator of the video, called “Housing and Ireland’s Shadow Government”.

Dublin City Council gave the project planning permission, but after an appeal, An Bord Pleanála overturned that in October last year, refusing permission.

In the narrator’s view, this is a sign of the “increasingly centralised and undemocratic nature of the planning system”. What can be done?

The bar for overturning local authority planning decisions should be raised, the narrator says.

And An Bord Pleanála and the Residential Tenancies Board should each be split up and regionalised, “to move us away from Ireland’s trend towards single-threaded government”, he says.

This video has so far got 43,000 views, and hundreds of comments, many of them complimentary. Other Polysee videos like “The Battle Between NIMBYism and YIMBYism” and “How to Build Thousands of Apartments in Dublin” have also got tens of thousands of views.

“I’m impressed by the traction it’s getting,” says Seán Keyes, finance editor with The Currency, who has appeared in a couple of them.

In among the comments on these videos are sceptical voices, like whoever goes by @Lazerfocus3113, who wrote “I’m convinced this channel is, quite frankly, endorsed by investment firms”.

Whether or not investment firms think it’s great, Kieran Lucid, the man behind this new-ish media platform says it’s not backed by real-estate developers or anyone like that.

It’s a self-funded project, says Lucid, who says he’s not in the property business or connected to a political party. “I’m a computer programmer,” he says.

From tech to media

Lucid, who is from Kerry and went to University College Cork, co-founded a “big data” company called QuantumKDB. According to Silicon Republic, the company was sold in 2016 for £2.2 million.

After that, Lucid said on the phone Friday, he moved to Dublin, and threw himself behind an effort to join up soccer leagues in the north and south into an all-island league. That hasn’t happened (yet, at least).

More recently, he launched Polysee, its first video marked as having gone live three months ago.

“The goal is to reach people who don’t read newspapers as much,” Lucid says. Polysee publishes primarily on YouTube, and other channels are “just an afterthought”, says Lucid.

The project has three pillars, Lucid says: ambition and beauty in architecture, localism, and appealing to people to respect the referee.

He says he can understand why people would dislike developments designed with “this new bland modernism”. “If we pay attention to beauty, hopefully that will reduce some of the objections,” he says.

He also thinks the protection of older buildings in the city “sometimes goes too far”, he says.

Although some of the videos align with priorities of the so-called Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) movement, “for me, to say this channel is YIMBY is a bit too far”, Lucid says.

The localism pillar is about strengthening local government, Lucid says. An upcoming episode will look at the idea of having a directly elected mayor for Dublin, he says.

“Irish people have a healthy scepticism of local government – brown envelopes and all that,” he says. But the system now is too centralised, he says.

The third pillar is about treating politicians better, Lucid says. “We think there’s a worrying trend of good people leaving politics,” he says.

The opportunity costs are just too high. “You’re not going to take a pay cut to get abused all day – especially women,” he says.

“If we keep abusing our politicians, who is going to run the country?” he says.

Future plans

At first, Lucid was working on Polysee part-time, but now “I’m taking a year out to do this properly,” he says.

The team has three part-time architectural modellers, to work up the slick renderings of streetscapes and housing developments featured in the video, and a full-time video editor, Lucid says.

It also has a couple of freelance researchers, he says. Lucid is also owner of Blackrock-based Peloton Social Ventures, which has a job ad up for a “non-fiction writer” for a YouTube channel.

Lucid says Peloton is “just my personal limited company and I’m the only shareholder. I’ve used it in the past for IT consulting, and this is the company’s only concern.”

“The Social Venture Capital description came from my very brief idea to invest in social enterprises, including a food delivery rider co-operative called Proper Order, but I decided against it and instead I have pursued this,” he says.

Adverts run during Polysee videos on YouTube, where its channel has about 7,500 subscribers.

Also, the project has a Patreon membership programme which on Tuesday had 46 members paying about €92 a month.

“If it [Polysee] could wipe its face in a couple of years, that’d be great,” Lucid says. “As long as I can see a bit of growth, even if it’s slow, that’s okay.”

Is he worried about depending essentially on a single tech platform – which could change its policies and priorities – to distribute Polysee’s videos? Lucid said YouTube is just kind of what’s worked.

“In the beginning, we posted on Twitter and TikTok also, but YouTube is where the videos have taken off, which is just as well as I think the platform is better suited for more considered deep dives than the more ‘frantic’ audiences elsewhere,” he says.

At the moment the Polysee team is publishing a video about every 20 days, but the aim is to do one a week, Lucid says.

There’s a few videos about housing, but Polysee has also published “Could Cork Be ‘Independent’?”, and “The Biggest Plastic Polluters in Europe”.

“The best videos are the ones that show all the different viewpoints,” Lucid says.

Says Keyes, the journalist at The Currency: “He seems to just be really passionate about policy, so good luck to him.”