Knocking down unfinished houses and estates should only be a “very last resort” for the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), a housing charity said today.
Respond Housing Association said it was “crucial” that a national audit of all ghost estates and empty properties be conducted before demolition is even considered.
Nama chief executive Brendan McDonagh told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service that the agency may be forced to knock down such unfinished property developments outside Dublin.
Mr McDonagh said certain half-built developments “should never have been contemplated” as it was hard to see how they made sense even at the top of an “overheated” market.
Aoife Walsh of Respond said her organisation was receiving conflicting reports on how many empty properties are located throughout the country, with numbers ranging from 40,000 to 345,000.
“It is vital we know exactly how many empty properties there are, where they are located, what condition they are in and what services and transport links are available in the surrounding area,” Ms Walsh said.
“With housing need at its greatest in living memory, Nama needs to engage with the social housing sector. With so many empty houses, there is an opportunity now to significantly reduce the estimated 100,000 families on local authority housing waiting lists.”
Respond asked Nama to consider the social gain that could be achieved through the utilisation of these empty houses by local authorities and housing associations.
It hoped the assets agency would consider the different options of selling, leasing, holding, developing or managing these estates before deciding to demolish them.
The organisation said it understood Nama must take a commercial view and obtain value for money for the taxpayer.
“However, this can still be achieved by engaging with the social housing sector. It could be argued that the only real housing market at the moment is the social housing market as private demand has been virtually wiped out.”
Respond suggested social housing providers could lease or purchase some of the so-called “ghost estates” through a long-term leasing initiative proposed by the Department of the Environment.
The housing agency Threshold said, however, the use of these estates for social housing was not necessarily the solution to the problem of housing need.
Threshold chairwoman Aideen Hayden said the first problem was that the figures on the number of empty housing units varied "all over the place" up to more than 300,000 vacant units.
Given that total production in 2007 was less than 100,000 units, this suggested everything built since 2005 was now vacant, Ms Hayden said. She did not believe this to be the case.
She said she would also like to see figures for the number of social housing units constructed, which a 2004 report said should be of the order of 10,000 units per year.
"We need to know exactly what we are talking about."
Ms Hayden added that a lot of the housing stock now lying vacant was "not appropriate" to everybody in need of housing.
"There is a significant difficulty in assuming that because nobody else wants to live somewhere, that social housing tenants do, that anything that's the last choice should be given to them."
She said tenants seeking social housing often had greater needs because they did not own their own transport and needed access to public transport, for example.
"A lot of the housing that was inappropriate to start with is inappropriate now, and I don't think Nama is necessarily wrong."
She said there may not be any choice but to destroy some of the units because of the cost of maintainance and upkeep involved.
It should perhaps be asked whether those employed in building the housing that was now lying vacant would have been better employed building hospitals and roads in areas where they were needed, rather than homes where they weren't needed, she said.