Why our empty buildings can't be turned into schools, hospitals or jails

Focus Ireland has suggested using some of the Republic’s 250,000 empty buildings to house the homeless. But how workable are the many proposals for ways to reinvent our empty shells?

WE’VE ALL SEEN them as we walk or drive around: the empty or unfinished buildings that are a highly visible reminder of the overdevelopment of recent years. There are estimated to be about 250,000 empty buildings in the State. Many of these developments will be examined by Nama in the next year, and the question of their future use will not become clearer until that process has taken place. In the meantime, many people and organisations have an opinion on what could be done with these buildings, beyond leaving them unoccupied and unused.

They include Focus Ireland, the agency that advocates for the homeless. Last week, at the launch of the organisation’s annual report, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy suggested that “these houses can be used to house the people who are homeless and those people who are on the housing waiting list.”

Among other uses that are regularly mentioned for the now-closed hotels, empty offices and ghost estates are nursing homes, hospitals, schools, community centres and prisons. But how practical are these suggestions, even leaving aside the issue of who will own these properties in a year or so?

David Petherbridge is a director of RKD Architects, a practice with offices in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, as well as in Dubai and Antwerp. Its Irish commissions include Tallaght hospital; Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, in Crumlin; University College Hospital Galway; and Samson House, a clinic that specialises in hair transplants.

“On paper a conversion might look feasible. We’ve been asked to do a few hospital feasibility studies already for some of the hotels out there. But they don’t work,” says Petherbridge. “The amount of work you’d need to do with the building means it’d be cheaper to knock it down and start again.”

He explains that “heavily serviced structured grids” are the key drivers of how space is organised in a hospital: the areas occupied by operating theatres, for instance, are the most crucial in any working hospital; they are usually located at the centre of buildings, with everything else radiating out from them.

“The only place in a hotel you’ll get that kind of space is the ballroom,” says Petherbridge. “And the ballrooms tend to be located close to entrances, because of access, so that means there is a huge rearrangement of space to be done. If you’re working with a hotel and trying to convert it to a hospital, you are going to be compromised in so many ways. It’s much easier to adapt a building backwards than to upgrade an existing building.”

Primary-care centres, such as consultants’ clinics, doctors’ surgeries and places that require rooms for only minor treatments, are potentially easier conversions, he says. So what about turning some empty buildings into nursing homes, which do not require on-site surgical services? “Nursing homes are not as expensive to build as a hospital,” says Petherbridge. In Ireland, however, nursing homes are usually no more than two storeys high, and are often only at ground level for purposes of accessibility. Conversely, hotels frequently have several floors. “You need lots of space around a nursing home,” Petherbridge says. “For outdoor activities, for gardens, for control zones for Alzheimer patients. That’s why many nursing homes are located either in city suburbs or in the countryside, whereas hotels are often in more densely populated areas and often don’t have much surrounding space.”

RKD looked at a couple of hotels that it deemed suitable for conversion to nursing homes, “but in the end the client said they could buy the land next door and build a purpose-built nursing home more cheaply”.

There has also been talk of using some buildings as prisons, given the overcrowding in existing facilities. Is this realistic?

“To start with, I would say there would be huge resistance from existing local communities. That’s without even looking at the security issues of adapting a non-purpose-built building into a prison; even an open-type prison.”

Petherbridge is sure that some of the empty buildings around the country will be knocked down. “But it’s very hard to tell what the future of these buildings will be. It’s all about what the location requires. For some hotels, though, you could look at college or school conversions. Those are low-tech builds. But, on a residential scale, there are so many apartment blocks it’s hard to know what to do with them. Everyone was counting on the transient population coming to their county, but there are only so many people. And there’s no point building support services such as schools if you don’t need them. It’s quite a depressing story.”

Respond!, Ireland’s largest not-for-profit housing association, with about 5,000 properties around the country, aims to help both those who are homeless and those living in unsuitable housing; its mission statement is to provide “housing for social investment rather than financial profit”.

“We’re very interested in buying some of these houses and estates that are empty,” says Aoife Walsh of the organisation. “We’d always be of the view that we’d try and create communities with pockets of people in one place. There’s no point putting a few people here and there.”

Housing demand will always be tied to location and to population density. “You have to provide housing for people where they want to live,” she says. “I think one of the things we’ll be left with is a lot of empty housing where there wasn’t a housing need. Look at the Border counties, like Leitrim, where there were so many tax-incentive apartments and houses built. Why? Was there always going to be a high level of take-up for holiday homes in those regions? We know now there wasn’t. So is there a corresponding need for social housing there? It’s all about location.”

Paul Kelly is an architect with Dublin-based FKL Architects, who helped organise Shadowland, an exhibition and presentation last December for which seven Irish practices brainstormed ideas about the built environment after Nama. (The website is shadowland.ie, and it is still open for comments.)

Among the ideas that FKL proposed was “Two-Fer”. “You could offer two houses in half-empty estates or ghost estates for the price of one, as an incentive to buy,” says Kelly. “Then they could rent them out, run a business from next door, grow vegetables. If the housing estate has enough people in it, then you can improve the quality of life for those who already bought into it by improving services, such as schools. But it’s going to be a judgment call each time, and everything will have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis.”

Probably the most esoteric Shadowland proposal was that of Ghost Town. FKL proposes on the website: “Unfinished estates in inappropriate locations for housing could be turned into ‘Cities of the Dead’ on a European model with the unfinished houses reused as crematoria and chapels and the remains housed in semi-detached tombs.”