Locals likely to be given first refusal on Dublin affordable homes

Locals will have first refusal on the purchase of large numbers of affordable homes in north Dublin under new measures due to be voted on by Fingal county councillors on Monday.

Councillors are expected to approve plans to give priority to housing applicants who can prove they have lived in Fingal for at least five years when allocating up to 30 per cent off new affordable homes.

An applicant does not have to be currently resident in Fingal, and may have only lived in the area as a child, as long as they can prove they spent five years in the area.

The Government’s affordable housing regulations introduced in April allow local authorities to use their discretion in allocating 30 per cent of the homes in affordable purchase schemes to locals. Fingal will be among the first local authorities to move to activate this provision in the legislation.

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Fingal is ahead of most other councils in the provision of affordable housing for sale, having last year started construction on 39 affordable homes at Dun Emer in Lusk priced from €166,000 for two-bedroom apartments to €258,000 for three-bedroom, semi-detached houses.

The homes were all allocated before the new regulations were introduced, and the council determined applications would be accepted from people resident in Fingal for 12 months. While the new scheme will require a longer association with the county, this provision will apply to 30 per cent of the homes, with the remaining 70 per cent open to applicants from any area, as long as they meet the eligibility criteria.

Already approved

Fingal’s priority scheme has already been approved by the Department of Housing and is expected to apply to all its affordable housing development from now on.

The council plans to start construction on 52 affordable homes in the coming months at Hayestown in Rush, with applications due to open to buyers in early 2023. Its next project, and the largest affordable housing scheme in the pipeline, is for 600 affordable homes at Church Fields in Mulhuddart, with construction of the first 300 due to start before the end of this year.

Another 240 affordable homes are to be built as part of a larger scheme of 1,200 houses and apartments at Ballymastone in Donabate.

Separately, the Land Development Agency (LDA) has recently lodged planning applications with An Bord Pleanála for large-scale social and affordable housing schemes in Balbriggan and Skerries. It plans to build 817 homes at in Castlelands in Balbriggan and 345 homes at Hacketstown in Skerries. Fingal’s scheme of priorities for the sale of affordable housing will apply to both schemes.

These sites had previously been owned by the council, which bought the land during the last boom for social and affordable houses, which were not built after the recession hit. In 2010 the government established the Land Aggregation Scheme to bail out local authorities that were facing mounting debts on loans they had secured to buy land for housing schemes that were no longer viable. The Balbriggan and Skerries sites were transferred from the council to the State’s Housing Agency, and subsequently to the LDA.