Sir, – Hugh Wallace is quite right (“Living over the shop can give a new lease of life to our cities”, Property, November 10th).
There are indeed many vacant over-the-shop properties in our cities and towns. Looking around the Donegal Diamond and a little further afield at 11 of a summer’s evening a while back, we counted 100 buildings, with lights shining upstairs in just two; 98 were dark, and it wasn’t because the people of Donegal are early sleepers.
Studies of MacCurtain Street in Cork, by UCC if memory serves, showed similar figures.
There are tens of thousands of vacant upper stories in towns and cities across the country. At a time of housing crisis.
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These properties are indeed not counted as vacant in the Department of Housing’s counting methods.
There have indeed been several Department of Housing initiatives, such as “Living over the Shop”, and so on, to try to remedy this ridiculous and unsustainable situation. All of these have indeed proven useless.
Why?
Property owners do not all seek to leave buildings vacant when they might get a rent from them.
A primary reason for this state of affairs is precisely, as Hugh Wallace writes, within the State’s control. The building control legislation developed in recent years is so complex and expensive to follow that, developed for large new-build projects, the exact same procedures apply to a house owner seeking to upgrade one flat over his ground-floor shop. There is no sensible reason for this.
It would be possible to develop a simple set of rules for a one-stop shop statutory instrument to deal with fire safety, access, sound insulation and sanitary provision.
A building owner or their agent to make an appointment with their local authority and clear the proposals, if sensible ones, over the desk. Some of us developed precisely such a set of proposals about a year ago and got nowhere.
This is a moderately technically complex area. The politicians are dependent on their officials to execute this. But the politicians might and should give clear, explicit instructions, and if the officials object, one place to start would be by reappointing the Building Regulations Advisory Body, dormant for over a decade now.
It can be done.
These thousands of potentially comfortable, simple homes will continue to remain empty until, as Hugh Wallace writes, something is done about the building control legislation. – Yours, etc,
EOIN Ó COFAIGH,
Dublin 4.