The plans for a new co-living apartment building in Dublin has come under fire after it emerged that over 40 people will be expected to share a single kitchen.
A developer is currently seeking permission to build a 208 room shared-living home in Dun Laoghaire.
The apartment will see 42 bedrooms share one kitchen.
Green Party European elections candidate Ciaran Cuffe slammed the plans describing the idea as "dystopian" and“Dickensian”.
He 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.’
Architectural drawings reveal that the size of each bedroom will only be 16.25 m2, and will have a communal living room which will be 24.10 m2.
Cllr Cuffe added: “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.”
