Planner warns 9 years to clear vacant houses if slump prevails

ADDRESSING the national conference of the Irish Planning Institute, Ciaran Tracey, planning officer with Leitrim County Council said if the economic conditions that prevailed in the last year do not pick up, it will take “about nine years to clear vacant housing stock in urban parts of the county and God knows how long elsewhere”.

Mr Tracey, speaking in a personal capacity, said the problem of oversupply in Leitrim was largely a legacy of the rural renewal scheme and its accompanying tax breaks in the Upper Shannon region.

He said while the scheme brought significant benefits it was “actually ill conceived” and instead of ending when it should have in the summer of 2002, it was extended so that tax breaks were available until 2008.

Since the scheme ended, there have been no starts on housing estates in the past two years. During the life of the scheme, supply far outstripped population, which up until 2006, had declined enormously in the country, by 84% between 1841 and 1996, from 155,000 to just under 29,000.

There are about 6,000 vacant units in the county but Mr Tracey said they were looking on them “almost as a bonus”.

“If they are sealed against the weather, then we are looking at these houses in the sense that they are a bonus. We remember when we did not have houses – now we’ve no jobs but we have the houses. So what we are saying is, you come to us and you’ll get the cheapest housing in Ireland”.

Mr Tracey said there also needed to be some mechanism introduced in the legislation that would allow local authorities put a time limit on the time it takes to complete works. That mechanism existed in the 1963 Act but was cut from new legislation in 2000.

He also suggested mothballing developments (reduced cost maintenance). His local authority has done it in one case and returned some money to the developer to allow him complete ancillary works.