Housing vacancy is again making headlines. Figures from GeoDirectory, which is a joint venture between Tailte Éireann and An Post, estimates the housing vacancy rate at 3.8 per cent or 81,449 houses. Census 2022 by the CSO calculated Ireland’s housing vacancy at more than 163,000 houses, or 7.7 per cent.
Forty-eight thousand houses were vacant for more than five years and, again according to GeoDirectory, an additional 20,092 were derelict.
We need some degree of vacancy to align sellers and buyers, and based on GeoDirectory figures we do not have a housing vacancy problem. A stroll through many of the State’s cities and towns, however, would suggest that this conclusion is perhaps optimistic. (Questions to GeoDirectory about the difference between its figures and CSO calculations went unanswered.)
Last year architects Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry recorded 700 empty properties within two kilometres of Cork city centre, about 70 per cent of which was housing. At the same time, there are 2,893 households on the Cork City social housing waiting list, or just 300 houses for sale if that is your preferred metric.
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“Dereliction eats away the urban fabric [and] wastes vital resources, makes areas look ugly and feel unsafe. So why has it been normalised and enabled by the State?” O’Connor asks.
It is a fair question. A cultural aversion to interfering with what people do with their properties or even asking owners what they are doing with them is part of the problem. An assumption that property rights are non-negotiable and take precedence over the common good has also led to a propensity for people doing what they want with their property or nothing at all.
There are penalties on buildings that end up on a council’s Derelict Sites Register, but their application nationally is sclerotic. At the end of 2023, Dublin City Council was owed €6.8 million in unpaid derelict buildings fines. Councils are also culprits themselves: “Chances are, in Dublin, if it has buddleia growing on it, it’s owned by the local authority,” Ciarán Cuffe, the former councillor and MEP, recently told the Dublin Inquirer.
A “vacancy relief” for commercial rates for those with unoccupied shops and offices, including those above the shop, is also questionable. In France, nearly 3,700 towns have introduced a tax of 17 per cent of the rental value of a property empty for more than one year, rising to 34 per cent in year two. Here, as this newspaper’s recent series on Derelict Dublin showed, important and run-of-the-mill buildings lie vacant for decades to the point of dereliction and we pay little heed and often no penalties.
As with a lot of Irish regulation, laissez-faire enforcement is the norm, and it just doesn’t work.
Vacant and derelict buildings stem from market, policy and ideological failure. The result is unpleasant environments, and towns and villages dying for the want of inhabitants, at the same time as multiple buildings sit empty. Sometimes for reasons of affordability, sometimes because the town isn’t attractive – and sometimes just because of their own notions of grandeur – people build new houses outside towns and drive everywhere. Both practices are unsustainable.
Legislation, policy or technical solutions can only do so much – in the end it is about the State as much as it is about individuals
Attempts to beautify towns and woo back inhabitants to by improving the urban experience with more public seating, pedestrian crossings and wider footpaths, for example, often run into sand for one reason: councillors don’t want any parking removed. Yet research shows three things: walking, cycling and public realm improvements can increase retail sales by 30 per cent; Irish retailers overestimate the proportion of their customers who arrive by car to do their shopping and underestimate those who walk; and people who walk to the shops go there more often. A good public realm is a good business realm.
In towns where the public realm has been improved, footfall and business has increased. See Blackrock, Co Dublin, or Virginia, Co Cavan, or Clonakilty, Co Cork. Ireland’s market towns in particular, the Strokestowns and Templemores with their wide streets, have huge potential for attractive urban realms to entice new families and business.
Ireland’s capital exhibits the characteristics of both a shanty town and a beautiful town. The difference between Dublin and comparable international cities is that these characteristics often exist side-by-side on the same street, including its main thoroughfare; what Jude Sherry calls “public squalor”.
Dublin city had more than 18,000 vacant residential units in Census 2022, with more than 5,000 of these recorded as available “for rent” (there were 34,000 nationwide). A lot of these are illegal short-term lets – the Airbnb phenomenon is another example of letting people do what they want with their property at the expense of wider society. There is now a new Bill to regulate short-terms lets.
Buildings aside, the most memorable feature of good cities is the public transport system. Despite being open since December 2017, neither Cabra nor Phibsboro Luas stops have any public street signage. Look at the beautiful bus and metro stations in European cities – with actual signage. We get bus stops on the side of roads with not even a seat or shelter from the rain.
In 2017, Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen brought forward a good vacant house refurbishment Bill. More recently, the Greens had something similar, but it lapsed with the election. There are refurbishment grants available for vacant and derelict housing, but these are paid retrospectively, reducing their usefulness. There has been limited progress on easing the conversion of vacant above-the-shop units with some exceptions – Waterford City and County Council has been doing good work via the Repair and Lease Scheme.
Dereliction and vacancy – and our tolerance for both – are symptoms of a bigger problem: the low value we put on place. Unfortunately, as with road safety, there seems to be only so much legislation, policy or technical solutions can do. In the end it is an issue of attitude – of the State as much as of individuals. For a country allegedly obsessed with property we care surprisingly little for it, apart from its financial value of course.
The engraving on 19th century engineer Thomas Drummond’s plinth in Dublin City Hall reads: “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” It should be imprinted on the deeds of every building in the country.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is senior lecturer in housing at Technological University Dublin
