The number of vacant properties in Dublin City has been overblown, and in a high proportion of cases there are legitimate reasons for them to be empty, Dublin City Council chief executive Owen Keegan has said.
Taking part in a panel discussion on the future of Dublin City, organised by Trinity College, Mr Keegan said he was in "no doubt that the city has paid a high price for decades of suburbanisation".
On housing, Mr Keegan, who said he was speaking in a personal capacity, disputed a contention from the Central Statistics Office that there are 30,000 vacant units in the city.
“There is an urgent need to tackle the factors that prevent the refurbishment of upper storeys,” he said. “There are significant extra costs associated with that compared with new builds, and I think it’s going to call for a higher level of financial incentive to reward that.
“On the issue of the 30,000 vacant properties, we took the census figure in one local electoral area and went to all the properties that had been reported as vacant, and in a very high proportion of those there were legitimate reasons why the houses were vacant.
‘Bandied around’
“They were not available to be reused. So, I think that figure is constantly bandied around. I just don’t believe there is that number. We tried to find out by interviewing neighbours why properties were vacant, and there were people in hospital, people away, people studying.
“There were a whole range of quite legitimate reasons why the houses would have been vacant for a short period when the census enumerator visited.”
Mr Keegan also said there was a need to tackle the “proliferation” of built-to-rent developments.
“In the city council area, nearly all planning applications for apartment development are built to rent schemes, most of which are built to minimum national standards,” he said.
“While built-to-rent development certainly has a role, the near total dominance of this has adverse long term consequences for the creation of sustainable communities, which the city council considers requires a wider choice of housing types and mixed tenures in the city.”
Another issue he said, is “the loss of cultural venues” in the city. “Culture is a universal and fundamental part of human experience and plays a central role in defining us a society, and indeed in defining Dublin as a city,” he said.
“However, rapid economic growth is having a negative impact on the affordability and accessibility of spaces to undertake art and cultural expression.
“The city’s development plan seeks to counteract this by promoting the development of a number of cultural clusters across the city, and requiring that new large scale developments provide at least 5 per cent floor space for community, arts, and cultural uses.
“It also requires where demolition or replacement of a cultural space is proposed, that any new development must accommodate a cultural use with the same or increased area of space.”
Mr Keegan said the extent to which the plan would be realised depends on a number of factors, including the role of An Bord Pleanála, which he said has “shown an increasing disregard” for the provisions of the city development plan.
It has done this, he said, “in exercising its very considerable planning functions generally, and especially in assessing strategic housing development applications”.
He added: “Thankfully however, the board’s approach appears to have come at least partially unstuck, as indeed has the whole SHD process, as a consequence of the very significant increase in recourse to judicial review of the board’s decision.”
