Last Monday, at about 8am, part of a terrace of Victorian cottages along the Grand Canal in Dublin 6 – properties which have been listed on Dublin City Council’s Derelict Sites Register for just under two years, but which had for decades previously been falling into dilapidation – collapsed into the street. It was a warm and sunny morning, and many Dubliners were making their way along that stretch of Canal Road; according to a report in this paper, an eyewitnesses said the falling masonry very narrowly missed a cyclist and a pedestrian walking their dog. It was, it seems fair to say, sheer dumb luck that nobody was killed or seriously injured.
Photographs of the property, taken in the immediate aftermath of its collapse, are startling. Almost the entire front of the house has simply fallen into the street, the narrow footpath strewn with rubble and splintered wood. The roof, the whole terrace of which had been entirely covered with plants, has caved in. The building, over many years of total neglect, had simply rotted away and died.
Who is responsible for this? In a direct sense, the owner of the building is responsible. And the owner of the building, it turns out, is the Construction Industry Federation, the representative body of the construction industry in Ireland. According to that Irish Times report, the facade of the rotting building had until very recently been concealed by “a banner advertising a CIF construction safety campaign.” I will freely admit to having an almost gluttonous appetite for irony, but this is a little too rich even for my tastes.
It’s hard to see this incident as anything other than a lurid symptom of a disease that is eating away at Dublin from the inside. As beautiful as many parts of the city are, and as vibrant as it can be, Dublin’s problem with dereliction has become something like a definitional one: there is no experience of the place that is not marred by the fact of its many empty and unpreserved buildings, falling into states of advanced putrefaction.
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“Good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub,” Leopold Bloom famously reflected, in Ulysses, of his infamously bibulous hometown. An equally good puzzle, more than a century later, would be to cross Dublin without passing a derelict building. There’s barely a street in the city centre that isn’t marred by abandonment and dilapidation, by boarded up windows and grubby, peeling facades.
[ Dublin’s vacant buildings: ‘It’s my property, I’ll do whatever I want with it’Opens in new window ]
This is both an aesthetic and an ethical blight on the urban environment, encroaching incrementally and relentlessly on the experience of those living in the city. And it’s a clear and insistent indication of poverty: a poverty that arises not out of a lack of money, but a lack of civic pride and responsibility, among both the property-speculating classes and the political establishment.
In fact, it’s a form of poverty that arises out of people having too much money. It’s true, of course, that some buildings remain empty for long periods because their owners are very elderly and living in homes, or because they are languishing in complicated probate, or whatever it might be. But in many, many cases, such dereliction is a choice on the part of property owners who are wealthy enough to let a property sit vacant year after year, blighting and corrupting the urban environment, as the land it sits on steadily accrues value in the context of a housing crisis (or a seller’s market, depending on which side of the threshold you’re on.) It takes considerable wealth, that is, to make a city feel so impoverished.
All this dereliction, all these residential neighbourhoods with boarded-up houses and shopping streets with dead and dormant retail units, is a result of a totally dysfunctional attitude toward property and property ownership. On the evidence of Dublin’s sheer volume of empty buildings – more than 14,500 homes and commercial units vacant for over four years, according to data collected earlier this year by An Post – the State’s view of the issue seems to be that, well, it’s a shame, of course, but we can’t prevent people doing whatever the hell they want with their own property. But this is deeply antisocial behaviour, of a scale and impact of which, typically, only powerful groups are capable.
It’s antisocial not just in the sense of the destruction of a shared environment (though it is certainly that), but in the sense that it reveals a deeper carelessness about, and disdain for, the experience of fellow citizens. (There are parts of Dublin, as Hugh Linehan forcefully put it in this paper last February, that feel “like a city designed by people who despise its inhabitants.”)
For those who are suffering in various ways from this country’s housing crisis – the growing number of homeless, the young (and no longer so young) who have lost all hope of owning their own homes, or of living anywhere close to where they work – these derelict properties amount to a profound insult, like watching someone throw out untouched food when you are convulsed by the pain of hunger. As Rory Hearne put it in Gaffs, his book about the housing crisis, this is a “viscerally pernicious inequality. Those without access to homes can literally touch and see derelict buildings abandoned because the owners have an excess of wealth and property.”
But let’s say you don’t care about that. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you don’t care about people who are living on the streets or who can’t afford a home. Let’s say that you have somehow managed to exist in such a way that no one you know or particularly care about is detrimentally effected by this apparently very wealthy country’s confounding inability to provide affordable housing for its citizens. Even then, you’ve still got to live in the place, haven’t you? You’ve still got to look at the place.
And it’s dispiriting, day after day, to move through a city so badly disfigured by dereliction, where you’re never quite sure whether a gigantic banner bearing a message about construction safety might hide a facade that is about to collapse on top of you, like a hazardously over-stacked metaphor. We should have more respect for our capital city, and for ourselves, than to tolerate this situation, and those who have created it.
