500 homes lie empty as 7,500 wait for housing

There are more than 500 council houses lying vacant across Cork City.

And it is costing the city an estimated €1m in lost rental revenue every month, a city councillor has claimed.

Socialist Party Cllr Mick Barry warned that with savage cutbacks in housing maintenance budgets this figure will rise, and people will continue to languish on the city’s housing waiting list which now stands at over 7,500.

“The situation is getting worse, not better, and it’s costing the city money,” he said.

Mr Barry was reacting to figures contained in a housing report prepared for councillors, which also showed that as of August, there were just over 7,500 people on the city’s housing waiting list.

The report shows a total of 516 vacant local authority dwellings across the city.

The vast majority, 254, are with the council’s maintenance department awaiting repairs.

Cllr Ted Tynan (WP) said given the fact the council was forced to cut €1.2m from its budget before the end of this year to balance its books, drastic steps must be taken to tackle the backlog in housing repairs.

He called on the Government to sanction the setting up of a direct labour unit, that would take unemployed construction workers off the dole, and put them to work repairing these properties.

Sinn Féin’s Cllr Thomas Gould said he received votes from several people on the city’s housing list.

“Now they would appear to have no hope of getting a house,” Mr Gould said.

But Cllr Michael O’Connell (Labour) said most of the people on the housing list are in receipt of state housing aid in the form of rent supplement already.

And he also pointed to the high rate of refusals from people who were offered council homes.

“A total of 152 houses were refused by applicants last year.

“Think about the administration and workload that went in to the allocation of those properties.

“Then you make the offer, and they come back to the council and say ‘no thank you’.”

Cllr Seán Martin (FF) said during the boom years, the state threw money at housing schemes “like town drunks” and didn’t solve the problem.

“We didn’t solve it when we had money. I don’t see how we’re going to solve it now when we have no money.”

However, city manager Tim Lucey defended the city’s housing policy.

He said the number of vacant dwellings represents just a fraction of the city’s entire 8,831 housing stock, and compares favourably against other local authority areas.

But he accepted that people on the housing list are facing a long wait, in some cases for several years, before being offered a local authority property.