Waterford council leads way in converting vacant homes to social housing

Waterford City and County Council has led the way in bringing vacant and derelict homes back into use for social housing by creating a special unit which identified suitable properties, an Oireachtas Committee will be told on Tuesday.

The council will appear before the all-party Committee on Housing to outline its progress in supplying social, affordable, and cost rental properties in Waterford. The committee will also hear from Limerick City and County Council. It is part of a series of committee hearings to evaluate how local authorities are implementing the Government’s Housing for All strategy.

In a submission to the committee, chaired by Green Party TD Steven Matthes, Waterford chief executive Michael Walsh outlined that the local authority has restored many vacant and derelict properties to be fit for habitation, through the use of two schemes.

The local authority has been the most active in using the Repair and Lease Scheme (where the council part-funds the repair on condition the owner leases the house to social tenants) and the Buy and Renew Scheme, where the councils purchases and renews housing units in need of repair and makes them available for social housing use.

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The council has made 85 units available on the Repair and Lease Scheme alone since 2019, by far the highest number pro rata in the State.

Mr Walsh’s submissions said more than 5,000 vacant residential units were identified in Waterford by the 2016 Census, which was 13 per cent of all stock. The council established a vacant homes team which worked with owners to allow their properties to be used for social housing through the two schemes.

Mr Walsh said these schemes were “particularly effective” but said the results of using compulsory purchase orders were more mixed because of legal delays and challenges.

The council provided a total of 664 units for social housing in the three years from 2019 to 2021. It has a target of delivering 1,216 units (or about 250 annually) between 2022 and 2026.

Limerick chief executive Pat Daly, in a separate statement, told the committee that the council had delivered 551 new build houses between 2018 and 2021, with a further 235 homes were acquired.

He said that Limerick’s target for the five-year period to 2026 is to deliver 2,693 new-build social homes (or almost 540 annually).

He said there are currently 41 projects on site and there was a strong “pipeline” for delivery of targets. He said the council also had a target of 1,156 affordable homes in the same period and said a delivery stream for those had been identified.

To ensure delivery of mixed-tenure on large sites, the council are promoting an approach where 50 per cent of the scheme is assigned to affordable homes – either cost-rental or affordable purchase, – 30 per cent to social-rental homes and 20 per cent promoted for a private right sizing model (typically houses for older couples who wish to downsize).

Like other councils, Mr Daly said delivery had been affected by factors including Covid site closures, material supply, cost inflation issues and labour shortages.