Rory Hearne: Vacant homes present an opportunity we are ignoring
The back of 60 and 61 Shandon Street in Cork city which are on the Derelict Sites Register. Local authorities are not using the Derelict Sites Act 1990 sufficiently, due to a lack of funding, where they can levy owners of derelict sites and property and CPO them rapidly. Photo: Larry Cummins.
“If you tolerate this, then your children will be next”, sang the Manic Street Preachers. It's apt when we consider the way we’ve tolerated the criminal neglect of vacant and derelict properties blighting our country for decades — a subject to which this newspaper recently dedicated a series with important, in-depth analysis.
Our children are growing up to become adults watching derelict and vacant homes and buildings crumble and decay around them, even as they can’t get a home of their own. Dereliction and vacancy is unacceptable when we face a climate crisis that requires us to embrace sustainable living.
That is why it is frustrating to see the figures revealed in this paper today that just three local authorities have full-time vacant homes officers. It's another indication of the lack of coherent response to the housing crisis.
The most authoritative figures on vacancy are provided by the Central Statistics Office in the Census. In 2016 it showed there were 180,000 vacant homes - that's liveable homes, not derelict or falling apart.
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There’s an increasing problem of vulture investor funds leaving new units vacant because they are not getting the rents they want. It’s all the same underlying problem: the vacant or derelict house, the decaying building, the dilapidated shop, the luxury and build-to-rent apartments left vacant – property is being treated as a commodity rather than a home.
Cian O'Callaghan of Trinity College, who has been researching the area of vacancy, says that without having an accurate picture of the levels of types of vacant housing, it can be a challenge to implement policies to bring the stock back into use. He points out that the government approach that was initiated under Rebuilding Ireland has essentially tried to use market mechanisms to incentivise owners to either sell or lease the property to local authorities for social housing.
However, we need to think about ways to make it less attractive to sit on vacant properties as speculative assets.
A new vacant property tax is being mooted. But how will it be different from the current, ineffective vacant sites tax? Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has also said that the vacant property tax would not have a significant impact, based on a report by Indecon in 2018.
However, that report used a methodology that suggests a much lower level of vacancy than the one reported by the CSO. The Indecon report states that if a vacant property tax is to be introduced it must be very high in order to be effective.
The coming budget will not see such a tax, which would be another opportunity missed by the Government to tackle the crisis. The "use it or lose it" tax on zoned development land trumpeted in the Government's latest housing plan, Housing for All, is also not due to come in for six years.
Some local authorities are making an effort to tackle vacancy and dereliction. A buy and renew scheme has been in place since 2017 under which local authorities can use compulsory purchase orders to buy vacant housing, refurbish it, and let it out as social housing. However, since its introduction just 700 homes have been bought and used for social housing.
That is well below the original target of 3,500 homes set by then housing minister Simon Coveney. Louth County Council delivered 83 units, while Dublin City delivered just 58, and Galway City and Sligo delivered just one. It would be unfair to just blame local authorities.
Since the 1980s central government policy has underfunded them, as it shifted to the private market to deliver housing. Local authorities were essentially told by the Government that they no longer had a role in housing. This reached its high point in the austerity decade of 2008 to 2018 when councils were gutted of their housing and planning budgets and staff.
Now local authorities are being told to tackle issues like vacancy without the capacity to do so. The Housing for All plan continues the inadequate level of ambition and funding for local authorities with a target of just purchasing 2,500 vacant units by 2026. Furthermore, these are to be sold onto the market.
Why are they not being retained as social housing or cost rental affordable homes? Are we going to see local authorities CPOing vacant property, refurbishing it and then selling it on to an investor fund to then rent out at unaffordable rents?
Another example of the existing powers of local authorities that are not being used or funded sufficiently is the Derelict Sites Act 1990 where they can levy owners of derelict sites and property and CPO them rapidly. The current lack of enforcement of the Dereliction Act is a clear problem.
Local authorities require the funding to engage in a huge programme of CPOs of vacant homes and derelict properties and buildings. The upcoming Budget is a real opportunity to provide this.
Councils also highlight Article 43 of the Constitution, which sets out the right to private property, as a major barrier and the ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to them CPOing vacant properties. Article 43 enables challenges from property owners to CPOs, while An Bord Plenala has also ruled against local authorities attempting to buy up derelict property and sites.
While Article 43 states that property rights can be “regulated by the principles of social justice” and delimited in the interests of the “common good”.
However, this is clearly ineffective to enable stronger legislation and powers for local authorities to tackle vacant and derelict buildings. This shows the urgency to hold the referendum to insert the Right to Housing into Article 43.
In 2017 in a presentation to the Oireachtas housing committee, architect Mel Reynolds and others identified seven obstacles to tackling vacancy yet how many of these have been addressed? They highlighted that there was enough capacity above commercial ground floors for 4,000 apartments in Dublin.
The real estate investment funds and large developers want to keep the focus on subsidising the development of ‘new’ build homes.
The bringing into use of a huge stock of vacant and derelict buildings is of no interest to them, and therefore is not given a real priority in policy.
For example, in Housing for All, there was no overall annual targets for the delivery of homes from vacant and derelict property. There remains an absence of real political will to tackle dereliction. But citizen action is growing, and within that lies a hope to create a different approach.
- Rory Hearne is assistant professor in social policy at the Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University
