Local authorities handcuffed - Change laws to curb city dereliction

All across Europe, communities struggle to sustain the relevance and soul of city, town, and village centres.

Streets that one pulsed with humanity and commerce are becoming ano-man’s-land where too many businesses are boarded up; where too many empty windows offer mute, funereal testimony to overwhelming change.

Decline tightens its grip every day. Despondency and fatalism replace energy and the kind of circular transactions that lift — or at least once lifted — all boats.

This hollowing out is hugely symbolic and damaging to communities’ self-esteem. Whether it can be reversed, or even challenged effectively is an open question.

The process, exacerbated by the economic crash of 2008, a market engineered to rely on ever-climbing rents, a huge swing to online retailing and, in many cases, poor access to city and town centres, began nearly half a century ago. Iconic retailers quit hemmed-in high streets and moved to suburban shopping malls.

This migration was seen at its earliest and sharpest in poorer areas where banks followed supermarkets, leaving communities — in today’s terms at least — in a kind of purgatory.

Bargain stores and takeaways replaced what were once a community’s anchor enterprises: Butchers, chemists, family-run food stores, shoemakers too, and, all too often, post offices. Surviving street-level businesses often seem crushed by the weight of the empty, redundant floors above — a symbolic Sword of Damocles for our times.

This change has many causes and many consequences. It concentrates wealth — ask any farmer trying to make a living selling beef to a supermarket chain or family draper surrounded by cannibalising clothing chains.

It corners consumers and limits competition. It also feeds a widespread sense of being neglected by powerful, unknown forces that operate beyond accountability. This feeling is, in a neat and dangerous symmetry, exploited by political forces that pick at vulnerability often in the most malign ways.

In what may be a peculiarly Irish consequence, the great-grandchildren of emigrants who come to visit the Old Sod might find rural communities, villages, or even small towns more straitened than those their ancestors fled. So much for progress.

Another consequence are abandoned properties and sites falling into dereliction, many others that are already derelict. These sites, many of which are owned by the State, turbocharge urban decline; they change the tone negatively in once-vibrant urban quarters.

Today we publish details on the impact this phenomenon is having on Cork City and the local authority’s stymied efforts to confront that challenge.

What emerges is a picture of labyrinthine, complicated legislation standing between the common good and private ambition or indifference. One detail — only 7% of Cork City Council’s derelict site levies have been paid. Another is the great difficulties in trying to identify property owners, a process described as “challenging and time-consuming process”.

This seems another area where we need to reorder our priorities. We need to change legislation to help local authorities breathe new life back into urban centres before they are choked to death by “property rights”.