THESE COULD ALL BE HOMES ALL BE HOMES

Neglected and unsightly, with the right incentives derelict buildings could help ease the housing crisis

DERELICT, rotting or abandoned, vacant buildings around the country are being left to slowly decay, at a time when the need for housing is at an unprecendented level.

It would be a sorry situation at any time but in a growing crisis, in which house prices and homelessness are soaring, it’s a particularly galling sight.

But what will be done with them, if anything? The prospect of a tax on vacant homes, in a bid to motivate owners to either sell them or restore them to an inhabitable state, has again fallen off the agenda.

It was previously backed by Tánaiste Leo Varadkar as a potential move to help tackle the housing crisis but Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said last month that a tax on vacant homes will not ‘change the game’ in solving the shortage.

Further confusion arose in the Budget this week, when a Zoned Land Tax was announced to replace a Vacant Site Levy, which applies to sites zoned for residential use — not built properties. The opposition has criticised the new tax on ‘land hoarding’ — which is intended to encourage the use of land for building — for being 4% less than the levy it will replace.

People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett called it ‘a total joke’ but there is little humour to be found in the spiralling housing crisis.

Today, housing activists will highlight the problem with a ‘walking festival of dereliction’ in Dublin. The latest figures show that there were 1,402 registered derelict sites at the end of 2019, but this is at the low end of the scale.

By contrast, the GeoView Directory’s figure of vacant and derelict properties is more than 92,000, as highlighted by TDs in a recent Dáil debate.

Mitch Hamilton, a communications officer at Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), one of the co-organisers of the festival, said it centres around a walking tour aiming to ‘highlight the history of some of these houses and the tragedy of letting these houses become derelict’. ‘It will also highlight the human cost. With the campaign, we refer to it as: “This could be a home,”’ he says.

Hamilton says that the housing crisis ‘is at this point universal’.

‘It doesn’t matter the size of your community, you’ve got people who are suffering from it and spaces that are not being used properly,’ he says. ‘Dereliction kills your feeling of community. It makes it hard to think of yourself as being part of a neighbourhood.’

Ian Lumley, the head of advocacy at An Taisce, agrees that dereliction has a ‘damning effect’ and ‘drags towns down’.

‘Having derelict buildings in a town or village or city is like a disease that needs to be combated,’ he says. ‘The cure is bringing towns back to life and taking the action against the negligence or otherwise of the owner who is allowing that to happen.’

Lumley explained that legisla

tion under the Derelict Sites Act ‘only really allows intervention when the building becomes derelict’, adding that there needs to be ‘a lot more proactive work by local authorities’.

Last month, the Government unveiled its Housing for All plan to spend a record €4billion annually on building more than 33,000 new homes a year by the end of the decade in an effort to tackle the housing crisis.

But Dr Rory Hearne, a lecturer in social policy and housing expert at Maynooth University, said there is too much focus on building new homes which are ‘utterly unaffordable’.

‘The state abandoned housing during the financial crisis and over the last five or six years, they’ve completely focused on the new build, this idea of needing to promote investors building new apartment blocks and developers building new estates,’ he says. ‘The problem has been, they haven’t focused on dereliction or vacancy as an area to supply housing because that’s not what developers and finance are interested in and housing policy is completely orientated around them.’

Dr Hearne says that a vacant homes tax would be useful in incentivising people to stop hoarding and to reduce the amount of hoarding, but that funding local authorities to deal with the issue is the solution.

‘For me, the big solution is for the state to borrow €1billion to set up a fund for local authorities to buy up derelict property,’ he says. ‘Some of them can then be developed for people who want to buy a home, some into social housing, and some into affordable rental. I think that’s ultimately the only way to do it.’

Meanwhile, the number of homeless people across the country rose for a third month in a row in August, with the Department of Housing recording 8,212 adults and children without a home.

It comes as the average price of a house was revealed to be €287,704, almost €24,000 higher than a year ago, in the latest quarterly sales report by Daft.ie. From April to June 2021, rent prices also increased by 7% — the highest amount in more than two years.

With demand soaring above supply, the average monthly rent now stands at €1,352 per month — though even homes for rent are in short supply.

Under the Derelict Sites Act 1990, local authorities must maintain a register of derelict sites — defined as those which are neglected, unsightly or in a dangerous condition — and have the power to issue notices to prevent a site becoming or continuing to be derelict.

There were 1,393 notices served in 2019, with huge disparities between local authorities, despite dereliction being a nationwide issue. Two counties alone made up almost half of notices, with 180 in Limerick and 475 in Mayo, while Donegal, Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo issued none.

Local authorities have the power to serve compulsory purchase orders, under which they can obtain the site without the consent of the owner.

Michael McNamara, the Independent TD for Clare, who requested the figures in a parliamentary question, said: ‘The only legitimate reason that I can see for the disparities would be the reluctance to register and serve CPOs as local authorities would be stuck with sites that they might not be able to shift on.’

Instead, he said compulsory sale orders, which are being developed in Scotland, could be considered. These allow authorities to sell buildings and plots to be rejuvenated rather than bringing them under local authority control.

Meanwhile, he has written to county managers to find out why there are disparities in implementing the Derelict Sites Act and whether there is demand for legislative changes.

What’s clear, however, is that without action, these unsightly buildings are going to continue to blight our towns, when they could easily be put to a better use.

‘Dereliction kills your feeling of community’