The future of several derelict Dublin houses, some of which have become structurally unsound, is to be determined by Dublin City Council within weeks.
A number of buildings across the city, including crumbling houses on Connaught Street in Phibsborough and Ferguson Road in Drumcondra, “shouldn’t have been purchased” due to the extent of their dereliction, a senior council engineer has said.
Almost 100 private houses have been bought by the council since 2018, mostly in older suburbs, as part of a scheme to bring vacant properties back into use for social housing. Most have become new homes for council tenants, but some have fallen into a state of extreme dilapidation.
These include adjoining houses at 19 and 21 Connaught Street, which the council bought in 2019 for €700,000. It decided last month it could not go ahead with their conversion to social housing because of the “excessive” €1.7 million cost of the remedial work required.
RM Block
Two adjoining houses at 8 and 10 Ferguson Road in Drumcondra, bought by the council in 2018, now face demolition due to extreme subsidence. The council undertook emergency stabilisation work on them in 2012, but they were not entered on the Derelict Sites Register until 2017 when they were valued at €120,000 and €100,000 respectively due to their already poor condition.
Senior council engineer Robert Buckle said a number of properties were bought “regardless of their condition” in an effort to secure additional social homes in response to the housing crisis.
“Unfortunately, Connaught Street and Ferguson Road ... in my opinion, they should never have been purchased in the first instance,” he said.
There were more buildings “throughout the city that, because of the housing crisis, the city council went and bought which they really, really shouldn’t have bought at all,” Buckle told councillors this week.
“Properties that are so derelict, in such a poor condition, that it wasn’t in the best interests at all to try and buy them because you’re now looking at huge costs to try and bring [them] into social housing, which just does not make financial sense. That money should be best spent elsewhere.”
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The council’s housing maintenance and planning divisions would be meeting within the next week, he said, to determine recommendations for the future of several buildings that have become unusable for social housing.
In some cases, he said, it was likely that a recommendation would be put forward for their sale or for the demolition of the buildings and reuse of the sites.
A decision is expected to be made shortly afterwards by council chief executive Richard Shakespeare.
