The council says no because the planning permission is for offices. A new owner could apply to change that.
On Kevin Street in Dublin 8, concrete pillars prop up the second storey of an unfinished building. A sign reads: “Revealing a new office and residential campus in the city”.
The Camden Yard development, on land formerly owned by TU Dublin, has planning permission for a large mixed-use development in five blocks reaching to 14 storeys at its highest.
The plan was to build mostly offices, together with 299 build-to-rent apartments.
Construction work stalled last summer, though, when the development manager on the project, Westridge Real Estate Group, struggled to raise fresh finance, according to The Currency.
Now the site is in receivership and set to come back on the market for around €90 million. Some local councillors say the council should buy it to build homes on.
There’s plenty of office space planned for the area, says Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne, including the former Bernard Shaw pub site on Richmond Street South. And people desperately need more housing, Byrne says.
A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said it is not considering buying the site because building has started and the planning permission is for offices. “Given the extent of the commercial office space within this development, i.e. 407,000 sq. feet, Dublin City Council do not intend to acquire this site.”
Byrne wonders whether there’s “any way of reviewing the current planning permission?”
Yes, says former council planner Kieran Rose. Any new owner could apply for planning permission to change the proposed development, regardless of whether construction has begun, he says.
However, this would require new designs, a fresh planning application and could be subject to requests for further information and appeals, so wouldn’t necessarily be a quick process, Rose says.
Meanwhile, Joseph Kilroy, head of policy and public affairs at the Chartered Institute of Building, says there’s a wider issue across the city with developers paying too much for land, sharp inflation of land values, and a drop in demand for commercial real estate.
TU Dublin sold its campus building on Kevin Street for €140 million in 2019, well over the guide price of €80 million, according to The Currency.
In 2020, the new owners, GA Development ICAV – acting for its sub-fund GA Development Fund – secured a 10-year planning permission for the site.
The majority of the site was to be more than 53,000 square metres of office space, according to the planning permission.
Kilroy says projects in Dublin have stalled because they are no longer viable and that the core problem starts when a developer overpays for the land. “The land market is unbelievably competitive.”
Residential land prices in Ireland are even more volatile than house prices, suggests research by ESRI.
They inflated faster than house prices during the Celtic Tiger, and crashed harder in the period after, it says. “Since 2012, land price inflation has again outpaced that of house prices,” says the 2024 paper.
Kilroy says that land for commercial real estate is overvalued, while at the same time there is reduced demand for office space, due to changes in work practices and the contraction of the tech sector, which is a major employer in Dublin.
From a low of under 10 percent in 2020, the vacancy rate for Dublin office space has been on the rise for several years, increasing “from 15.7% to 17.5% last year”, according to Savills 2025 Market Outlook report.
“Dublin commercial real estate market is in a state of structural vacancy,” says Kilroy. A report by BNP Paribas in late 2024 found that Dublin had the highest commercial vacancy of all major European cities it examined.
The report says office vacancy is set to increase and that all evidence suggests that the rents commercial landlords can demand will decline. While the price cuts will start with older office blocks, they will eventually impact new builds too, it says.
“When faced with voids, owners of older blocks will cut their rents until they attract occupiers,” says the report. “Because these offices have now become competitive with the slightly higher quality offerings ahead of them, owners of the latter buildings will have to counter-cut to restore their competitive advantage.”
That has an impact on the next level up, which in turn has to cut rents. “Through this process, vacancy at the bottom of the market eventually drags on rents at every level,” says the report.
Kilroy says developers overpaying for land also affects the viability of housing projects in the city. If a developer pays too much for the land at the beginning, the project won’t be viable – meaning they can’t make the profit they want and also cover their costs – and so it won’t be built, he says.
High land values incentivise certain types of high-profit development, Kilroy says. “That is why you often see developers in Dublin developing hotels and student accommodation.”
The solution is for the state to control land values in the first place, Kilroy says.
The government tends to get involved in assisting homeowners to buy homes, once they are built, says Kilroy. “If there was intervention at the point when land was going to market to ensure that the price was capped, you would have developers being freed up to provide more different types of tenure,” he says.
Developers don’t have a lot of choice at the moment, he says, they need to maximise profits on every development in the city to cover the cost of the land.
Rose, the former council planner, says that whoever buys the Camden Yard site can apply for planning permission to do something different on it.
“There are any number of developments that are suitable on a site, if they changed their mind and went for residential, that would be really good, rather than offices,” he says.
However, that would take time. A new owner would need to employ architects to design the residential scheme and then submit a new planning application which would then be decided depending on its own merits and could be subject to delays, like requests for further information and appeals, Rose says.
Councillors say they want to see the site used for housing. “I’d love to see it all residential,” says Fine Gael Councillor Danny Byrne. “That is what we need more than anything.”
But, he says, he is not convinced that Dublin City Council should take over the project. “It's a very large commercial transaction,” says Byrne. “I’m not sure they would even have the expertise.”
It’s a prime location for a mix of housing, says Byrne, the Green Party councillor. “I think there are lots of opportunities for that site to increase housing in general.”
Both the council and the Land Development Agency are talking about buying land in the city to build homes, says independent Councillor Mannix Flynn. “This site is a very obvious place to start,” he says.
The council doesn’t intend to get involved, though, according to its spokesperson.
“This site is now in receivership with Grant Thornton, and it is expected that the receiver will bring the site to the market in the coming weeks,” says the council spokesperson. “As we understand it, the agent expects to complete the sale by the end of the summer.”
Meanwhile, the site is just sitting there in the middle of the city, unused.
Phase 1b of the project to eventually build upwards of 700 homes on the site envisions building 30 fronting onto Dolphin’s Barn Road.
Instead, it’s moving staff to focus on other housing projects that will deliver more homes, said Dublin City Council’s head of housing.
This isn’t viable, so another use for the site will have to be found, a council official said.
Councils are reluctant to use the single-stage process because they take on more risk if something goes wrong, says Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin.
