It only requires a short walk through Dublin city centre to confirm the extent to which so many of its streets are blighted by dereliction, decay and under-use. Pockets of neglect can be seen across the city’s central districts but the problem is most glaringly acute north of the Liffey, where too many 18th and 19th century buildings have been permitted to fall into disrepair.
The symptoms are familiar: boarded-up windows, sprouting buddleia, collapsing roofs. But the root causes are also well understood by now. While confusion over ownership and responsibility plays some part, the underlying reason that these buildings are left to rot for decades is a misalignment of incentives that makes land hoarding more financially rewarding than refurbishment or redevelopment.
Responsibility for this state of affairs rests firstly with the property owners themselves. Their inaction is not victimless; it inflicts real social harm. But successive governments have been painfully slow to introduce appropriate penalties for owners who fail to maintain their buildings. And incentives for those who wish to convert the upper floors of commercial premises to residential use have proved inadequate.
Those failures have been repeated at local government level, where Dublin City Council (DCC), which itself owns a significant number of vacant properties, has struggled to devise a strategy that has real impact.
RM Block
In today’s Irish Times, Dublin Editor Olivia Kelly reports on DCC’s fresh approach. The council is establishing the Dublin City Development Corporation, a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that will be council-owned but governed by an independent board, able to borrow and invest without affecting the public balance sheet. Two streets – Middle Abbey Street and North Frederick Street – have been selected as pilot areas for concentrated regeneration. A new project management unit, with planning, architectural and quantity surveying expertise, will offer a “concierge service” to property owners, providing practical assistance alongside tougher enforcement tools including derelict site levies, rates arrears and planning inspections. Intelligence-gathering is already under way.
The new approach appears to be based on solid principles, drawing on examples from other European cities. The SPV model, in theory, allows for a virtuous circle of investment generating revenues that can be reinvested in further projects. If that means commercial viability becomes more of a priority for the council, that is not a bad thing. While social housing is an essential part of any living city, these streets were originally built for people to live, work and do business in. If they are to be returned to life, that bustle of diverse human activity will need to return with them.
