The arrival of a new cohort of homeowners is obvious from the facades of the homes on the Bulfin Estate in Inchicore, Dublin 8.
Built by Dublin Corporation in the 1920s, the estate is populated by three-bed semidetached and terraced houses, some of which retain their original pebble-dash exteriors with wood-effect or white PVC window frames, while others have been recently upgraded; they are freshly plastered with millennial-grey window frames, trendy chrome house numbers and mounted electric vehicle chargers. There is an unmistakable sense of transience here, with for-sale and sale-agreed signs dotted around the estate.
This mix of the old and the new on the Bulfin Estate is an example of Dublin gentrification in action, a term used to describe the movement of the middle classes into an area that was formerly working class, originally coined by sociologist Ruth Glass when describing London in the 1960s.
“It was probably five or six years ago when house prices started to really go out of the water, but definitely in the last two years it has gone [mad]. Now, nobody knows their neighbours because it’s youngish people coming in and they keep very much to themselves,” says Mary Fagan, a resident of the estate since 1988.
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“Now, so do I, you know, so I can’t really say a word about that,” she adds, with a laugh.
Fagan marvels that her new neighbours’ houses had asking prices of around €360,000 but ended up selling for half a million. She stresses that they are “probably lovely people” who are likely to bestruggling financially.
A three-bedroom semidetached home of 73 sq m in modern, move-in condition on the estate, for example, is currently on the market with a €395,000 asking price. Bidding for the house at the time of writing is up to €433,000, according to selling agent David Brock of Brock DeLappe. Similar houses would have had an asking price of about €325,000 before Covid, he says.
Mannix Flynn, an independent councillor for Dublin’s southeast inner city, claims so-called gentrification has “pulverised” former working-class areas in Dublin. Using Stoneybatter in Dublin 7 as an example, he says young couples with some money are moving in and creating “hipster hell”. Flynn argues that they may “think it’s edgy and cool” to live in these communities, but they are “eroding the working-class culture” there.
Rather than “gentrification” being a good or bad thing, although invariably that’s how it tends to be experienced by residents, Philip Lawton, assistant professor of geography at Trinity College Dublin, says it’s an inevitable result of investment moving from one area of the city to the next.
“In Dublin’s case, investment might have gone to places like Ranelagh and Portobello first and then it starts to move and expand up the canal, and now that’s why you’re seeing it happening in Inchicore.
“So, where you see investment happening, property prices go up, people then get pushed to the next inevitable location in terms of investment, and so gradually this starts to move around the city,” Lawton says.
“Gentrification is an inevitable outcome of the ways in which property markets operate within urban space.”
Fagan, who volunteers in her community, says: “What seems to have happened [on Bulfin Estate] in the recent past was a lot of residents have passed away; when we moved in, it was an older area. Now, the young people are coming in, they’re buying the houses and then gutting them, even if they’re very well done, they’re being gutted.”
She observes: “First the builders move in, and then they all move in and live happily ever after.”
The renovation of homes is a common factor in this process and inevitably has a knock-on effect on the value of those properties when they are resold.
Lawton says: “Coming into the 1960s, with what we might see later –deindustrialisation coupled with a shift to a services-based economy –you see what we would define as middle classes moving back into central areas.”
These homeowners then expended time and hard work – termed “sweat equity” – to upgrade period homes in working-class neighbourhoods.
This became the “cliched image of the gentrifier” at the time, says Lawton, “whether it be in Dublin, London or the brownstones [town houses with steps], for example, in New York.”
On Bulfin, the profile of the new residents moving into the estate seem to be mostly office workers, although many work from home, Fagan says.
“You’re not talking about Bob the builder or Paddy the plasterer, who used to live here when we moved in first. Like, if you wanted something done, if you needed a plastering job done, well, somebody four doors up would know somebody six doors up.
“Now, I think there’s an awful lot of them working from home. You can see that. Cars don’t move and they come out in the evening to go for a walk,” she says.
Asked if she thinks her daughter’s generation could afford to live in the area, Fagan says she knows they can’t, citing examples of her and fellow residents’ grown-up children who are living abroad, living with their parents or renting apartments elsewhere.
When younger middle-class buyers start moving into an area, speciality coffee shops offering high-quality brunch fare and pastries often follow close behind. Riggers in Inchicore, which opened about six years ago, could be taken as an example of such an establishment. It attracts queues of the “three-wheel-buggy crowd” on the weekend, says Fagan.
She prefers the more traditional cafe at the top of her road. “You walk in there at any stage and there’ll be somebody there that knows you. They’ll say, how are you, and you can have a quick chat if you want to talk, or not if you don’t,” she says.
On the northside of Dublin, new cafes were the first thing Phibsborough native Rachel Quinn (32), a brand designer for a software company, noticed about how the area had changed after she returned from spending more than a year abroad between 2015 and 2016.
“Bang Bang and Two Boys Brew opened during that period and they’re obviously extremely popular and people travel to Phibsborough to go to them, whereas, when I was younger, I don’t think people would travel to Phibsborough to go to places,” she says.
The growing popularity of League of Ireland football has also drawn people to the area, she says, with Bohemian Football Club attracting sports fans to Dalymount Park.
“I found that when I was younger, if you said you’re from Phibsborough, people would always think it’s like this dodgy area, which I never thought, anyway. If you met somebody from the southside, they’d be like oh, I didn’t think you were from there,” says Quinn. “It [still] wouldn’t be thought of as a fancy area, but people would be like, it’s more of a cool, hip area now.”
Quinn has recently bought a house close to where she grew up and her sister (34), a civil servant, lives in a house on the same street as their parents with her young family. She says Phibsborough looked a bit “grottier” when she was growing up, and men standing outside pubs would sometimes say “creepy things” to her as she passed after school, which she doesn’t think would happen now.
Apart from that, she doesn’t see a huge difference in the profile of residents, although she has noticed a huge rise in house prices.
“[My husband and I] have been immensely lucky to be able to buy in the neighbourhood I grew up in, which is obviously a huge privilege, but we were only able to achieve that because we were both lucky enough to have parents who were able to give us a bit of help, so we would have had to probably move a bit further otherwise,” she says.
She notes an appreciation of the arts as a common value among Phibsborough residents, and references Phizzfest, the community and arts festival established in 2009.
“A huge amount of the people who live on the street are artists and academics [and] there is a huge appreciation for being able to walk to the theatre, walk to the art gallery in the city centre, and to walk to the cinema, like the Lighthouse Cinema [in Smithfield].”
She believes the changes in Phibsborough probably began in the 1990s when her parents’ generation were buying. She describes them as “becoming middle class” at the time, having grown up in working-class families and being the first generation to go to college.
“My mam’s from Cabra so she always looked at the red bricks in Phibsborough and thought, that’s where I want to live, and just about managed to swing it. And my Dad’s from Longford and so he moved up when he was in college, but I would say growing up most people on the street, their parents were from the country and they had moved to Dublin for college and then stayed.
“[So] it was probably already gentrifying, it just wasn’t necessarily visible to people because there weren’t the cafes,” she adds. “I do think it’s probable that people living in Phibsborough have found a really nice place to live that they want to stay in for decades and it’s just now become trendier to outsiders.”
She and her husband also note the prevalence of local landlords selling their properties, thus leaving many long-term tenants unable to stay in an area, which will no doubt lead to a lack of a mix of classes in the community.
“There’s been a good few houses sold recently and a mix of those are ones that were rented and so obviously that’s going to be a loss of more accessible housing ... So, I suppose it’s probably true that it’s becoming maybe a little bit more uniformly middle class,” she says.
Back in Inchicore, Fagan also notes prohibitively high rents in the area, where she says a three-bed house on the Bulfin estate was recently being rented out for the “astronomical” sum of €2,400 a month.
Michael Pidgeon, a Green councillor for Dublin’s southwest inner city, says: “If you want to preserve an area’s character, or at the very least aim for something which has class mix, I think at the core the thing you need to focus on is housing.”
“To my mind, a fixation on cafes or what kind of shops are in the area, that’s downstream, that’s a symptom of what is often something that is ultimately driven by housing costs.
“And without rooting your analysis in housing, I think what you end up with is sometimes debates weirdly opposing investment or renewal in a village or a new park or something like that, on the basis that it will make the area nicer and thus more prone to gentrification, and you end up almost arguing for underinvestment in the area because it’s working well.
“So, for me, that means, in part, generally being supportive of new-build housing in an area, which sounds like it brings forward the gentrification in some ways, but the research I’ve seen indicates that that’s the best way to keep rents or property prices down.”
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With that in mind, Pidgeon says he welcomes the new development of 500 homes on the old St Michael’s Estate site, where a third of the homes will be allocated as social housing and the other two-thirds will be cost-rental.
“That to my mind is a really good way to try and moderate the kind of stuff you see from just purely a market-based approach, where you end up with whoever can afford to live in the area, does,” says Pidgeon.
“So I think that’s kind of a model for that sort of thing because yes, you’re going to have social housing tenants in there, you’re also going to have people who are earning a little bit above that, but who are effectively priced out of the Dublin property market for rental or purchase. And so, you’re going to have a mix there, but it’s a hard thing to get right.
“And while I do try to centre things on housing, I haven’t come across anywhere where they’ve really dealt with gentrification and it’s quite difficult to know beyond public housing, in practice, what policies you could actually put in place to mitigate it.”
On whether she thinks Inchicore is losing its working-class culture, as described by Flynn, Fagan says: “No, I don’t think we are.”
“I think we’re moving into a different time, but what’s a working-class culture if you think of it? Everybody that’s living here goes out to work or stays at home to work, you know. Okay, they may not be Paddy the plumber and Bob the builder, but certainly they go to work. I don’t think we’re losing anything.
“And I’m not saying we’re gaining anything either.”
