Tenants in Dublin's local authority flats are alarmed at council plans to sell off estates to developers in return for social housing, writes Kitty Holland.
St Michael's Estate is a bleak place, even on a gloriously bright winter's morning. Most of the 346 flats on this council estate in Inchicore, Dublin, are shuttered up with rusting fabricated steel, while tracts of tarmac between the 14 blocks lie desolate and empty. Graffiti festoons the stairwells and scorched scraps of tin foil on the floors tell that the deserted blocks are where drug addicts shoot up.
The 11-acre site on the banks of the Grand Canal was, until about three years ago, teeming with children and young families.
"I had a great, happy childhood here," says Martin Carroll (32), who has lived in St Michael's since he was 10 months old. "It was always happy days, out with the other kids on the estate."
Throughout the 1980s and again in the 1990s, like many local authority flat complexes across the city, St Michael's became synonymous with drugs, joy-riding and the worst ills of deprivation and poverty.
Today, just 60 flats are occupied and Dublin City Council (DCC) has plans to see all the flats torn down and replaced with up to 450 new houses.
"All existing tenants will be rehoused," promises DCC's assistant city manager, Brendan Kenny. St Michael's will be a template for the housing policy across the city he says - a "wonderful opportunity" for council and residents alike to move away from past policies which "created ghettoes of deprivation".
Explaining his vision, he has circulated a discussion document on housing policy. The experience of the past has shown "the building of large estates was not the right approach", he says. While close to €1 billion is due to be spent over the next five years on regenerating them, as well as an annual expenditure of €50 million on day-to-day maintenance, he believes the areas concerned still won't have moved from disadvantage to advantage. "It has been much easier to achieve physical regeneration than social regeneration," he argues.
It is "timely to consider the future management and indeed ownership of our current housing stock". DCC should, in short, examine ways of drastically cutting back on its role as a local authority landlord. Kenny envisages a greater role for voluntary housing associations in managing smaller communities of social housing.
The emerging policy shifts are causing anxiety among DCC's over 100,000 tenants, in 26,500 dwellings - so much so that representatives from each of the local authority estates are coming together to fight their landlord. They want, perhaps ironically, to keep their landlord.
To be launched this month with the help of Community Technical Aid, an organisation which offers expertise to community groups, Tenants First will "fight for the right of local authority tenants to stay living in the city", says Mick Rafferty, director of Community Technical Aid.
There is a sense, he says, that the council is "turning its back on its estates" and argues that spreading disadvantage around will dilute its appearance, not end it.
And if St Michael's Estate is to be the template, community representatives are particularly concerned. According to Rafferty, the St Michael's experience, like that of residents in the Liberties/Coombe area of the south inner-city in 2002, "raises serious questions about whether the council can be trusted to take residents' wishes into account".
Residents of the Liberties area were so disillusioned with the lack of consultation on implementing the area's Integrated Area Plan, they withdrew from the monitoring committee last year, citing broken promises and breaches of undertakings.
But Kenny says: "The one thing no-one can accuse us of is lack of consultation. We put an awful lot of effort into consulting everybody. I know consultation means different things to different people and when they don't like the decisions made they blame the consulation process."
Until August, St Michael's residents had worked enthusiastically with DCC over three years, drawing up a €63 million redevelopment plan. That month however, the Department of the Environment told Kenny it would not fund the plan, and the council is now pursuing a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to fund refurbishment. Residents say the council "tore up" their work.
They are "devastated", says Carroll, who also works in the estate's Family Resource Centre. "They worked in good faith with the council to regenerate their estate, and the council turned its back and is handing it over to private developers."
Kenny says the council will hand the land over to a developer who will build the required social housing, hand these back to the council and build private housing on the rest of the land at profit to themselves. "It's a way of tapping into the value of the land," says Kenny. "It's just a different, and faster way, of getting the same job done. Instead of contracting a builder to build houses and paying over money, we're giving them some land."
He estimates by the time building starts just 45 units of social housing will be needed, leaving scope for about 400 private houses. In the original plans there were to be 170 units of social housing and about 200 private.
Over in O'Devaney Gardens - an estate of 276 flats attractively located beside the Phoenix Park - residents are warily watching events in St Michael's. The council is inviting tenders for a PPP regeneration of the 13-acre site. Lena Jordan, the O'Devaney Gardens rep on Tenants First, says no-one knows what is happening.
"We don't know what will happen to rents, where our children will live if they want to stay near us. We're just very worried."
She says de-tenanting has begun - "12 flats are idle already" - and that, according to initial plans, just 170 units of social housing are planned, alongside 360 for private sale. "We'll be swamped by yuppies," she says.
Mick Rafferty says: "Proud working-class communities are being broken up to make way for sushi bars." While the influx of monied young people, expensive coffee shops and cocktail bars to once depressed inner-city areas may appear attractive to the middle-class eye, it is, he says a "let them eat cake" attitude to the original communities.
Echoing him, Michael Punch, lecturer in economic geography at Trinity College, sees many problems with the shift towards "an entrepreneurial approach" by the council.
"Legally they have an obligation to respond to housing need. The trend though seems to be one of getting out of social housing. There's the issue of effectively giving away public assets, and the level of subsidies being given to private developers." He sees the move to drive down the number of local authority tenants in these estates as a type of modern land clearance.
"The escalation of land values has seen land become a commodity again. The presence of low-income tenants is an obstacle to realising that value." Those that are left, says Punch, will find themselves competing with richer neighbours for resources.
"The small shops that sell the cheap cuts of meat and give credit to regular customers, the kind of amenities which make the day-to-day reality of poverty less problematic, they tend to get priced out once money flows into an area."
Kenny acknowledges this may happen, as "one of the negative aspects of progress". But he is adamant that large housing estates have not worked and that the concentration of deprivation unfairly stigmatised residents.
Carroll, like Rafferty and Jordan and others, however, see the trends as "worrying, frightening even".
"Kenny may call it progress, but for communities like us it's Domesday," says Carroll. "I couldn't see them going into communities in Blackrock and saying, 'You're time has come.' But that's what they're saying to us."
