Government to CPO thousands of properties as part of crackdown on vacant homes

Many families "like to be able to have a stab at owning one of those properties", the housing minister said.

No 19 South Terrace Cork City is on the derelict sites register. Picture: Larry Cummins

Housing minister Darragh O'Brien has promised to dramatically ramp up compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) as part of a multi-pronged approach to reducing the number of vacant homes.

Mr O'Brien is now instructing the Housing Agency to CPO thousands of vacant properties and to then put them up for sale on the private market.

This plan is among a number of initiatives that will focus on above-the-shop living, making it more affordable to renovate old buildings, changing planning laws, and bringing vacant properties into use.

"Vacancy has not been tackled in any sort of systemic way and structured way for a long number of years," he said.

Mr O'Brien admitted that current laws around CPOs are "complex", but he wants to make thousands of homes available to private buyers through this mechanism.

The minister has set a target of 2,500 properties that would be acquired via CPO over the next two and a half years. These houses would be on top of what is acquired for social housing.

"I actually want the Housing Agency to sell them back into the market, OK, just that we could also sell some of these vacant homes back into the private market," he said.

"There's a lot of working individuals and working families who would also like to be able to have a stab at owning one of those properties.

"This is on top of what we are doing in public [social housing]."

Mr O'Brien said that specific targets will be set in each area, adding that local authorities have a "fair handle" on the level of vacancy and are aware of properties that could be acquired under CPO.

Separately, Mr O'Brien has already indicated that exemptions for the conversion of commercial premises, as well as for above-shop living will be extended out to 2025. This means that a person will not have to apply for planning permission to change the premises from a commercial to a residential unit.

Mr O'Brien said: "Above-shop living is something that no government has cracked over the last decade or more.

"In every city and every town in this country, we have empty spaces above shops that people would happily live in. And we haven't been able to figure out how to do that better and to help to make it viable for people to actually convert them into homes and that has been for a couple of reasons.

"One is because the standards are so exacting, in my view, that they make it next to near impossible to do it unless you have a heap of money and you're really doing it as a labour of love. That's not sustainable."

He said he would be looking at issues around planning and also the categorisation of protected structures as part of addressing this.

"I've extended the exemption, the planning exemption from commercial to residential, so that is being extended to 2025," he said. 

"We need to do more than that, I can't do everything in the first year. But vacancy is a scourge and it is an untapped resource. We can do a lot better in that space."