Communities must be empowered to help solve homelessness
Within the next few weeks, work will start on building 19 new social homes in the middle of the estate where I live in Donnybrook, Dublin. This will be in addition to the nine affordable homes and the six additional social-housing units that we found space for in this small estate over the last few years.
Twenty-eight of these will have been developed by voluntary housing bodies and six by Dublin City Council. All will have been built on what you might call ‘left-over’, or council, lands. If this can be done in the heart of Dublin 4, it can be done anywhere.
By my reckoning, there are approximately 200 villages or parishes across the Dublin area.
If each of these was facilitated to deliver a similar number through local housing initiatives, assisted by – and not hindered by – the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, we could deliver around 6,800 new homes quickly. These could be financed locally, and off the national balance sheets, through the credit unions.
So come on, Minister Eoghan Murphy, look outwards and not into a department singularly incapable of doing the job.
Let the local authorities provide the planners, the architects, the quantity surveyors for these projects. Local communities can provide the local expertise and indeed the future tenants.
We need all kinds of new solutions. Here is one contribution – and in our case, we have delivered.
Councillor Dermot Lacey (Lab) Donnybrook, Dublin 4