‘People are getting used to apartments’: Council adapting housing strategy for changing city trends

As demographics shift across the country, Kilkenny County Council has been changing its approach to housing delivery accordingly, prioritising one and two bedroom units while moving away from larger houses in the city.

The necessity of this is reflected in the makeup of the city’s social housing waitlist, with 86% of the 596 approved applicants requiring one or two bed units.

Of the 55 social housing units delivered in Kilkenny City in 2025, around 78% of these were one or two bedrooms with the largest development at Marnellsmeadows on the Callan road containing 22 units in total.

As people have fewer children and start families later in life, the demand for smaller apartments has increased drastically and attitudes towards them are beginning to change while local authorities attempt to ease the effects of the housing crisis.

“Even ten years ago people kind of associated apartments with dodgy flats and lesser quality accommodation but that’s changing”, said Eimear Cody, Senior Engineer in the Council’s Housing Section.

“People are getting used to apartments being a proper house type and they’re less maintenance”, she added.

With 347 people on the city housing list waiting for one bedroom homes and 12 such units delivered in 2025, it’s no surprise that these applicants face the longest waits, sometimes of over 10 years.

The Council is hoping to reduce the pressure with new developments like 16 apartments at Bishopslough on the Tullaroan Road expected to be completed this year, while also learning lessons from the past and promoting communities with people of diverse ages and life experience.

READ NEXT: ‘We want to create a legacy’: CK United, a new era of Kilkenny football and the return of Buckley Park - Kilkenny Live

“We really need to look at the people waiting on one-beds and focus on delivering more of those”, Ms Cody said.

“People looking for a three-bed in Kilkenny City now can get it quite quickly because there’s a good delivery of them and not as many people waiting on the list. You couldn’t build a lot of one-beds all in one place either because it’s always good to have a mix of household sizes and generations together”.

“Years ago, you would have built a big estate of three-bed houses but all the families would be at the same life stage and it just wouldn’t make for as good a community”, she described.

The benefits of high-density housing through apartments can make for a much more efficient use of space and allow more people to live close to the city by reducing urban sprawl.

Apartments and multi-storey developments generally draw more objections, but a better standard of building in recent years and acceptance of shifting housing needs have changed some of these attitudes.

“You can understand why in a city like Kilkenny that wouldn’t have a lot of high rise, people just aren’t used to it”, Ms Cody said in her concluding remarks.

“We had the Broguemaker apartments on the Castlecomer Road and there was a lot of concern around that. We actually got a lot of commentary afterwards that people were very happy with the quality of builds”.

TAP HERE FOR MORE LOCAL NEWS

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme