Urban renewal ignores social housing

URBAN renewal schemes have been of considerable benefit to the recipients of the tax incentives and the rates remissions involved, including developers, property owners and investors.

Whether the communities that lived in the areas subject to urban renewal schemes benefited is an entirely different matter.

Urban renewal is nothing if it does not involve investment in people.

The suffering of those on the local authority housing lists is now immense and emergency investment is needed to provide homes for them.

There is great distress among young people who cannot afford to buy homes because of the actions of profiteers in the building industry, who have put homes outside the reach of ordinary working people.

This issue must be addressed. In the private rental area, we are seeing the return of rack-renting.

This should be tackled by the Government through investment in urban renewal.

If these problems are allowed to continue, they will give rise to a major social crisis, which is already developing. Vested interests must be taken on and investment in people put first.

Taxpayers should no longer be asked to subsidise building penthouse apartments which are selling for millions of euro and are being leased at enormous rents, while huge numbers of people, with their families are living in appalling conditions or in unsuitable accommodation and for whom the State is not providing.

If the urban renewal scheme is to be redirected, it should be at the provision of social housing.

The question that must be addressed is whether urban renewal will be effective in addressing social disadvantage and poverty or whether the social reasons are simply a justification for continuing tax incentives for certain favoured developers.

Cllr Noel Collins

St Jude’s

Midleton

Co Cork